Just two years after the changes were first rolled out to Android devices, the YouTube Music iPad app finally got a major update.
As highlighted by 9do5Google (opens in a new tab)The new version of the app, which just arrived in the App Store, brings much needed changes to the Now Playing screen.
The UI overhaul primarily brings improvements to the display of covers, and images are no longer edge-to-edge thanks to the new bezel.
By touching the artwork, you can now share the songs you play, download them for offline listening, or add the song to your playlist.
Thumbs up / down have moved past song title and artist, while the playback controls now fit nicely under the cover.
However, this is not all good news. While you can now swipe up or down to access the Up Next queue, for some reason you can’t swipe left and right to change the path like you did with the Android version of the app.
While it’s unclear why the changes to the iPad version took so long – the iPhone app underwent a major overhaul over a year ago – the changes will nonetheless be welcomed by users of the service on an Apple tablet.
Analysis: Is this the beginning of more frequent Google app updates on Apple devices?
While Google updates its Android apps with impressively frequent regularity, it’s fair to say that users of iOS and iPadOS apps haven’t felt the same love lately.
From the tiring waiting until picture-in-picture lands on Apple’s YouTube version, to the company Informing users that their own applications are out of date and pose a security issuein recent years, Google’s treatment of iOS and iPadOS applications has been on the verge of neglect.
The most overlooked were iPad YouTube Music subscribers wondering if the platform was completely abandoned.
The news of this overdue version of the software, along with the recent changes to the Archive feature in the Photos app (which was introduced with the Android versions), however, will give hope that the days of Google treating its Apple device apps as an afterthought will finally end.