Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- YouTube Music is developing a feature that will allow users to upvote public playlists.
- Playlist creators will have the option to control who can vote on their playlists.
YouTube Music appears to be working on a feature that would allow users to upvote their favorite playlists. Currently, YouTube Music only displays the total number of plays on a playlist, offering no indication of its overall reception by the community.
An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
While digging through the YouTube Music app for Android ( version7.05.52), we came across the following strings:
Code
• Collaborators only • Everyone • Voting off These strings suggest that playlist creators on YouTube Music will have the option to allow voting on their playlists. However, YouTube’s approach seems to offer more granular control than Spotify. Playlist creators will seemingly have the ability to limit voting to collaborators only, open it up to all users, or deactivate it entirely.
This update likely draws inspiration from Spotify‘s model, where public playlists once displayed a “like” count to gauge their popularity. However, Spotify recently replaced this feature with a “save” count, eliminating the ability to directly ‘like’ a playlist.
While the feature isn’t yet live, the necessary code appears to be in place, indicating that YouTube could activate the feature at any time. It’s unclear whether these upvotes will affect the search rankings for these playlists, but it definitely seems like a feasible approach.