Make YouTube Music look great on foldable devices with this tweak

i love YouTube Premium and YouTube Music. Even with the recent price increase, the value I get from all the music on ad-free YouTube and YouTube Music is unmatched, especially with my family plan. That’s not to say I don’t have complaints. The device limit is stupid and hard to reset and the app has never been good on my folding devices. Thank goodness recent UI update solved some of my complaints with the last one.

Before the current UI redesign, YouTube Music refused to show Samsung’s foldable UI unless you turned the phone to landscape. You can see it in the images above: my Galaxy Z Fold 4, which has not yet been updated, has expanded to fill the standard UI screen and lost space. The Galaxy Z Fold 7updated, finally showing a multi-column UI that allows faster queue access and better use of available space.

If you own a Fold 7, there’s a good chance you haven’t seen this change yet. You need to change the phone screen scale for this UI to work. go to Settings > Display > Display layout and zoom. By default, the screen scale on Samsung phones is set to maximum. That being said, some Google apps like Keep won’t display the collapsible UI unless you hold 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 foldable devices this will work on. Even after updating the Fold 4 to the latest version of YouTube Music, even though I have the updated app interface, it refuses to show the multi-column design in portrait view. This is likely due to the Fold 4 having a narrower screen than the Fold 7, so your mileage may vary depending on which Z Fold model you have.

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

Watch the video above and you will see the problem. YouTube Music offers no way to access lyrics or song queue on the Razr’s cover screen, and my Z Flip 6 has the same problem. Now every time you bring up the playing UI, it uses the full screen UI which should appear in landscape mode on your phone. This means that 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 see your queue.

Spotify has no such problem. Even in the cramped space of my cover screen on the 2023 Razr, I can still access all the music controls I need, including the queue and lyrics pages. I know it’s not the worst problem in the world, but it’s annoying. Google is making significant efforts to make Android the best platform for foldable phones, but the focus seems to be on book-style folds rather than flip phones.

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