YouTube for Android testing a blurred bottom bar

Compared to other Google apps, YouTube maintains its own mobile design language. That looks to be continuing, with YouTube testing a blurred bottom bar on Android.

Current

This new bottom bar remains short with text labels and uses tweaked icons for Home and Subscriptions, which are slightly simpler. Meanwhile, the plus button no longer has a circular white outline. Of course, the big change is how it’s no longer solid.

This YouTube bottom bar is translucent and shows the background feed. It works because YouTube’s Home feed is just large video thumbnails. In this example, the design is very noticeable because of three-button navigation doubling the height of the bottom bar. The effect will be minimized when gesture navigation is in use.

In the You tab, which has a dark background, you can barely tell it’s blurred. This blurring is vaguely reminiscent of Ambient Mode for the video player. It follows YouTube redesigning the miniplayer so it’s no longer docked to the bottom bar.

We’ve seen one report of this blurred YouTube bottom bar today, and it’s not appearing on any of our devices.