Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR YouTube Music tracks listening history across devices, but so far hasn’t offered a way to resume playback directly.
With YouTube Music version 8.26.51, we’re now seeing the app sync playback progress across devices.
Listeners are able to continue a playlist where they left off by tapping “Resume.”
It’s a fair question: How many of us are big YouTube Music fans, and how many use it because we want YouTube Premium, signed up before Premium Lite was an option, and now can’t be bothered to change things? For whatever reason you’re using it, Google has been giving subscribers plenty of reasons to be happy lately, with the arrival of new features like lyric sharing and offline lyrics for your downloaded tracks. Now we’ve got a new one to share with you — and this time, unrelated to lyrics at all!
Your Google account makes it easy to access YouTube Music across all your devices, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that moving between them has been super smooth.
While we’ve been able to keep track of what we’ve been listening to as we move from phones, to tablets, to computers and back, so far YouTube Music hasn’t offered an easy way to stop mid-listen and pick things up from that same point on another device.
Zac Kew-Denniss / Android Authority
Upon upgrading to YouTube Music version 8.26.51 (which started heading out to devices earlier this month), we’re suddenly see the presence of progress bars representing our listening activity on other devices connected to the same account, as you can see in a couple of those Speed dial entries above.
Zac Kew-Denniss / Android Authority
When you tap on one of those, you’ll now find a new “Resume” option that lets you pick up playback where you left off earlier.
This has been a long time coming, and while we we can’t imagine this is going to convince anyone to switch over to YouTube Music — it still doesn’t look like the feature holds a candle to Spotify Connect — maybe it will at least convince you to reconsider leaving YouTube Music for the competition.
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