YouTube Music rolls out a Material You home screen widget on Android 12

Update 1 (10/05/2021 @ 12:01 PM ET): The new turntable widget is now rolling out for YouTube Music users. Click here for more information. The article, as published on September 13, 2021, is preserved below.

Google revealed its updated design language earlier this year, called Material You, with a greater emphasis on color than the current iteration of Material Design. It also focuses on customizable color palettes, allowing you to change the look and feel of compatible apps. Google has been slowly updating each of its apps to use Material You ahead of the full Android 12 release, including Gmail and Google Calendar, and YouTube Music is in line for a redesign.

YouTube Music currently has a single widget on Android, which shows album art, media controls, and like/dislike buttons. Google is now testing an updated design for that widget (H/T GooglePixels on Telegram), which has a series of circles instead of a simple row of buttons. In the new YouTube Music widget, the album art is displayed in the middle, with a like button and a play button along the edge.

Image credits: GooglePixels on Telegram

The updated widget design comes after Google has been updating many of its other applications to match Material You. The company redesigned most of its productivity apps with Material You last week, including Gmail, Calendar, Meet, Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides. Clock and Calculator were updated with the release of Beta 5. Meanwhile, Google is also testing the new design with Translate, Lens, and the Messages apps.

The Material You redesigns we’ve seen so far have added support for dynamic colors, larger FABs, Google Sans text, and pill-shaped highlights of the bottom tabs, but none of these changes have made their way to the main YouTube Music app just yet. However, the presence of an updated widget design hints at more to come, so we’ll be keeping our eyes out for a redesign of the main UI.

Update 1: Rolling out

YouTube Music’s new turntable widget is now rolling out to many users. The widget should be available to users running versions 4.47 or later, but it’s activated by a server-side flag so you may not see it yet. Once it rolls out for you, here’s what it’ll look like: