Make YouTube Music look good on foldables with this setting

I like YouTube Premium and YouTube Music. Despite recent price increases, the value I get from ad-free YouTube and all the music on YouTube Music is unmatched, especially with my family plan. However, that doesn’t mean I don’t have any complaints. The device limits are silly and hard to reset, and the app has never been any good on my foldables. Thankfully, the recent UI refresh has fixed some of my complaints with the latter.

Before the UI redesign now underway, YouTube Music refused to show its foldable UI on Samsung’s foldables unless you rotated the phone to landscape. You can see this in the images above: My Galaxy Z Fold 4, which wasn’t updated yet, has the standard UI stretched to fill its screen, wasting space. The Galaxy Z Fold 7, which has been updated, finally features a multi-column UI, which provides quick access to the queue and makes better use of the available space.

If you have a Fold 7, there’s a good chance you’re not seeing this change yet. For this UI to work, you need to change the phone’s screen zoom. navigate to Settings > Display > Screen layout and zoom. By default, the screen zoom of Samsung phones is set to maximum. When this happens, some Google apps, like Keep, won’t show their foldable UI unless you’re holding your phone in landscape. Before the UI redesign, YouTube Music ignored this setting, but now it finally uses it.

Unfortunately, I can’t say for sure which Samsung foldables this will work on. Even when I updated my Fold 4 to the latest version of YouTube Music, it still refuses to show the multi-column design in portrait view, even though I have the updated app UI. This is likely due to the fact that the Fold 4 has a narrower display than the Fold 7, so your mileage may vary depending on which model of the Z Fold you have.

As happy as I am to see the YouTube Music app working better than ever on my Fold 7, the experience is terrible on a flip phone. One of my favorite things about my 2023 Razr Plus is the cover screen. I use the phone as a music player when I’m in bed, and the form factor makes it perfect for that, as long as I’m using Spotify instead of YouTube Music.

Take a look at the video above and you will understand the problem. YouTube Music doesn’t provide any way to access lyrics or the song queue on the Razer’s cover screen, and my Z Flip 6 has the same problem. Whenever you drag the Now Running UI, it uses the full-screen UI which should be shown in landscape mode on your phone. This means all playback controls disappear after a few seconds, and you have to touch the screen to get them back, and there’s no way to view the queue.

Spotify has no such problems. Even in the tight space of my 2023 Razr’s cover screen, I can access all the essential music controls, including the queue and song pages. I know it’s not the worst problem in the world, but it is frustrating. Google is making significant efforts to make Android the best platform for folding phones, but it seems all the focus is on book-style folds, not flip phones.

Are you satisfied with YouTube Music on your folding phone? Or is there still something that prevents you from using it? I would love to hear from you.