If you’ve been following along with various teardowns and reported tests, you know YouTube has been working to select an implementation for quickly and easily shifting small increments in a video’s timeline. The wait appears to be over. Earlier today, the YouTube app’s Play Store listing was updated to note that the quick seek feature is new in the app – that’s probably about as official as we’re going to see.The first evidence of a fast-forward / rewind feature appeared in a late 2015 teardown where it was originally designed to be shown as double-arrow buttons that appeared among the player controls. Over the following year, about a handful of slightly varied implementations turned up for small, randomly selected test groups. After a fairly long period without any sign that seeking was still on the roadmap, new activity appeared in a teardown last November. The following update even activated quick seek, but YouTube remotely disabled it. Since then, many people have reported being able to use the double-tap gesture, but that it would come and go intermittently or only worked on certain devices.
With an official nod in the Play Store listing, it’s pretty clear the inconsistency should no longer be a problem. Since many people had quick seek working on earlier versions of the app, it’s not clear if it has been remotely enabled on all versions that support it (going back to v11.47) or if you’ll need the recently released v12.03 (available at APK Mirror). There’s a good chance that updating the app will enable quick seek if you don’t already have it. If not, wait a few days and it should be there for everybody.
There’s an inside joke that the word “finally” gets thrown around too often and without much consideration by commenters and the tech press. I mean… <cough> Just sayin’. Anyway, thanks go to YouTube. I might pick on you a bit, but I think we’re all really happy to see quick seek is now for everybody.
