The latest YouTube Premium experiment adds better playlist management for mobile devices

Visiting YouTube’s new labs feature page periodically will present you with a bunch of experiments that you can take advantage of as a Premium subscriber, and the latest addition includes a picture-in-picture mode for iOS devices. However, that’s not all that Google is considering adding to the mainstream app experience.

Yet another experiment is sitting on the labs page and is ready to be toggled on if you’re a paying member. Until August 11, 2022, you can enable an enhanced playlist management feature that lets you reorder and hide videos from your playlists while on the Watch page.

How to use:

• Reorder: Drag videos within the playlist panel on the watch page to reorder them.

• Hide: Hide any video from the playlist panel by either swiping left on the video item or by tapping on the “Hide” option within the video three-dot menu.

At this time, the reorder feature is only available on Android and iOS, and not on the web. Unfortunately, this is common with experiments, but if it proves to be a success and Google gets lots of positive feedback, these new tools are likely to become a part of the mainstream YouTube experience.

Until now, playlists had to be manually managed via the three-dots menu where a remove option existed – no swiping to remove items, and certainly no reordering feature existed prior to this experiment, so it’s a welcome feature, especially for me, who’s notoriously complained about playlists being too barebones. Now, if we could just get some collaborative feature fixes so that collaborators can see my playlists on other accounts, that would be great.