YouTube’s infernal autoplay bug may actually be a feature in testing

When you open the YouTube app, you don’t normally expect to be greeted by a running video. However, a growing number of YouTube users claim this has started happening to them. While many thought this may be a bug, it appears it may actually be a feature in testing.

YouTube has a feature that automatically plays videos. If you don’t want videos to autoplay, there’s a setting that allows you to turn this feature on or off. Despite having the feature disabled, some users claim they see videos automatically play as soon as they open the app (h/t: Tech-Issues Today).

According to one Redditor, they say “I opened my YouTube app on my Samsung phone today, and it immediately started playing a video. I checked that autoplay was disabled and restarted the app, and that didn’t fix anything.” Another user responded by stating “It’s screwing with my algorithm,” referring to the algorithm the platform uses to recommend videos for you to watch next.

While this may seem like an issue with the autoplay setting, it may actually be a feature. A user who claims to have contacted YouTube Help says that a support representative told them:

I checked my resources here and yes, this is indeed an experimental feature. Feel free to share what you think via our feedback tool: yt.be/help/feedback. You can learn more here about experiments here: https://yt.be/help/JVg6.

It would be smart to take this claim with a grain of salt, especially as this experiment is not mentioned in YouTube’s tests and experiments tracker. We have contacted Google for confirmation, and we’ll update this post if we hear back.

Whether it’s an experiment or not, it seems most of the opinions about this feature are negative. Fortunately, it looks like some people were able to find a workaround. One such workaround is to uninstall the latest YouTube updates. Another trick that seems to work for some is clearing the app’s data and cache.