YouTube Music just got a great free upgrade on Android

Google's quest to upgrade all the things continues with another update for Android users

YouTube Music
(Image credit: YouTube)

Google's been very busy this month with lots of updates to Android and its many apps, making the best Android phones even better. For some reason Google adds some features to the iOS version first before making them available on Android, and that's the case with this latest Android app update: YouTube Music on Android mow has the "save queue to playlist" feature that iOS users got earlier this year.

Although the update is server-side – that is, you don't need to update the app; the changes happen on Google's servers – it rolled out to iOS users at the end of January but only began rolling out at the end of March. That means it might not appear on your phone just yet, but don't worry: it's coming.

What the new YouTube Music update delivers

If the new feature is available to you, you should see the text "Playing From" at the top of your Up Next queue, immediately above the first track. This will show you the currently selected album, the currently selected playlist or the currently selected radio channel. If you look to the right you'll see a Save button; tap on that and you can then save the current queue to a specific playlist or create a new one.

It's all very straightforward, and the Add to Playlist option works just like it does with any other track or selection. Be careful, though: tap on the wrong playlist and you can't undo your choice, which is a bit of a pain.

I genuinely don't understand why so many updates appear to be iOS-first; maybe it's easier to implement, or maybe Google does it so that if there's something horribly wrong with an update it'll hose iOS users rather than Android ones. But whatever the reason, it's good to see features like this making their way to Android to make apps a little bit better.

Carrie Marshall

Writer, musician and broadcaster Carrie Marshall has been covering technology since 1998 and is particularly interested in how tech can help us live our best lives. Her CV is a who’s who of magazines, newspapers, websites and radio programmes ranging from T3, Techradar and MacFormat to the BBC, Sunday Post and People’s Friend. Carrie has written more than a dozen books, ghost-wrote two more and co-wrote seven more books and a Radio 2 documentary series. When she’s not scribbling, she’s the singer in Glaswegian rock band HAVR (havrmusic.com).