Make YouTube Music look good on foldables with this setting

I love YouTube Premium and YouTube Music. Even with the recent price hike, the value I get from ad-free YouTube and all the music on YouTube Music is unparalleled, especially with my family plan. That doesn’t mean I don’t have complaints, though. The device limit is stupid and difficult to reset, and the app has never been good on my foldables. Thankfully, the recent UI refresh has fixed some of my complaints with the latter.

Before the redesign of the now playing UI, YouTube Music refused to show its foldable UI on Samsung’s foldables unless you rotated the phone into landscape. You can see this in the images above: my Galaxy Z Fold 4, which hadn’t been updated yet, has the standard UI stretched to fill its screen, wasting space. The Galaxy Z Fold 7, which has been updated, finally shows the multi-column UI, granting quicker access to the queue and making better use of the available space.

If you have a Fold 7, there’s a good chance you aren’t seeing this change yet. To get this UI working, you need to change the phone’s screen zoom. Navigate to Settings > Display > Screen layout and zoom. By default, Samsung phones have their screen zoom set to maximum. When that’s the case, 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 makes use of it.

Unfortunately, I can’t say for sure which of Samsung’s foldables this will work on. Even after I updated my Fold 4 to the latest version of YouTube Music, it 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 based on which model of Z Fold you have.

As happy as I am to see YouTube Music’s app working better than ever on my Fold 7, the experience on flip phones is terrible. 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, so long as I’m using Spotify instead of YouTube Music.

Take a look at the video above, and you’ll see the problem. YouTube Music doesn’t provide any way to access lyrics or the song queue on the Razr’s cover screen, and my Z Flip 6 has the same issue. Whenever you pull up the now playing UI, it uses the full-screen UI that’s supposed to show on your phone in landscape mode. That means all the playback controls disappear after a few seconds, and you have to touch the screen to bring them back, and there’s no way to see the queue.

Spotify has no such issue. Even in the cramped space of my 2023 Razr’s cover screen, I can still access all the music controls I need, including the queue and lyrics pages. I know this isn’t the worst problem in the world, but it is frustrating. Google has been putting significant effort into Android to make it the best platform for folding phones, but it seems all of that focus has been 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’d love to hear from you.