YouTube takes Subscriptions off its phone app’s bottom bar after nine years

YouTube is removing the Subscriptions button from the bottom bar of its Android and iPhone apps. The feed of new videos from channels you follow is now called “Subs” and sits second in a new row of tabs at the top of the Home screen, right after Home. If your thumb goes straight to the bottom of the screen to see what your favourite creators posted, that habit stops working.

The bottom of the app shrinks to four buttons: Home, Shorts, the “+” button for creating, and You. Everything else moves inside Home, into a top bar that YouTube says will carry “dedicated feeds” for Live, Music and Movies & TV. In its official TeamYouTube announcement, the company calls the change the start of “a series of updates to shape a more seamless Home experience.”

The same top bar holds YouTube’s new custom feeds. You tap the “+” at the top of Home, describe what you want in plain words, and the app builds a feed around that prompt. YouTube’s own example is “help me unwind after work with guided meditations under 10 minutes.” Each feed stays saved as a tab next to Home and Subs, and you can rewrite its prompt whenever you like. Free accounts can keep three active custom feeds, while YouTube Premium members can keep eight, and feeds made on the phone also show up on desktop under the same Google account.

Not every tab appears for everyone. Movies & TV only shows up for people who already pay for something there, such as Primetime Channels or YouTube TV add-ons, and it also collects rentals and purchases. According to 9to5Google, the redesign also gets rid of the app’s old navigation drawer, so the top bar becomes the main way to move between types of video.

The announcement leaves a lot out, starting with who gets the new layout and when. YouTube gives no schedule or country list for the navigation change. The custom feeds have clear limits: for now they work only in English, for signed-in viewers in the United States who are 13 or older and have search history switched on, and they are not available on tablets. YouTube says it is working on more users and regions, without a date. Viewers in Europe, Asia or Latin America may lose the Subscriptions button long before they get the feature that comes with it.

There are practical costs too. On today’s tall phones, the top of the screen is harder to reach with one thumb than the bottom bar, the complaint 9to5Google raised when it first saw this layout in a test. YouTube’s help page also says feeds and the top bar are not shown at all when watch history is paused or turned off, and it does not spell out where those viewers will find Subs. For people who use YouTube mainly to follow a short list of channels, the app now opens on recommendations by default, with their own choices one tab away.

Subscriptions had held its spot in the bottom bar since 2017. YouTube began testing its removal this spring, when it confirmed to 9to5Google that it was experimenting with moving the feed “to the top of your screen.” The company posted the final version on Thursday, October 22, and says more changes to Home will follow, though it has not said what they are.

The button that took you straight to the channels you picked is gone. Those channels now sit one tab over from the feed YouTube picks for you.

Tags: Google, youtube, iPhone, Android, app redesign, custom feeds