This year’s most popular smartphone trend is the edge-to-edge or full display design. Starting with the Samsung Galaxy S8 series back in March, almost all flagships have embraced the full display design quite religiously. In line with this trend, YouTube has released a new update to its app. This update gives smartphones with displays offering 18:9 aspect ratio the ‘pinch to zoom’ feature.
YouTube uses 16:9 aspect ratio for its videos on the platform. For those videos lower than this aspect ratio, YouTube processes and minimizes the video file which then appears with black bars on the left and right sides or on top and bottom. This way, it crops the videos giving the 16:9 aspect ratio. However, for smartphones with displays offering more than 16:9 aspect ratio, YouTube videos would be cropped accordingly.
The latest YouTube update is now available for both iOS and Android which you can download from App Store and Play Store, respectively. On Play Store, the update is version 12.43, and on App Store it’s 12.44. There are a good number of Android smartphones with large displays. For the iOS platform, it’s only the recently launched iPhone X. Google had first included this feature for its Pixel 2 XL smartphone which also has the same display. Samsung also has a similar feature for its 18:9 display smartphones, the Galaxy S8 series and Galaxy Note 8. 
In September, Google released HDR support for YouTube videos as an exclusive update for flagship smartphones. This feature would only work on smartphones supporting HDR video and some of these include the Google Pixel  series, Galaxy S8 duo, Galaxy Note 8, LG V30, among others. 
More recently, Google announced its latest stats on YouTube and its future plans as well. With over 1.5 billion users globally, an average YouTube user spends at least 60 minutes daily on mobile devices. Interestingly, YouTube also gets over 100 million hours of watch time on TV sets through devices like Roku, Chrome Cast and Amazon Fire TV. Google CEO Sundar Pichai further said that the company will focus on increasing its subscription-based monetized models for YouTube.