It looks like YouTube wants to make video downloads easier to manage for Premium users. Offline offline options entry has appeared and disappeared in the latest Android app versions for some. While the feature may not have been fully functional yet, it seems that it could allow you to download videos to your phone and make them appear automatically on other devices at some point.
The option showed in the Background & download options for some YouTube Premium subscribers in stable and beta, v15.49.34 and 15.50.32, but we already saw it as part of an app downgrade back in 2018. When you grabbed the option while it was available, you were given a popup asking you which device should be synced, along with a toggle that says, “Let’s download to this device.” However, when we tested this with two phones, download would not appear automatically on the secondary handset, automatically or in download format. We also tried restarting both phones to try to trigger automatic action that way, but to no avail.
With our 2018 teardown and a peek at the custom code featuring lines reading “Offline state update update” and “Error updating offline state offline,” we are very confident. that the feature should, of course, sync downloads across multiple devices at some point. But it’s also possible that Google scrapped that 2018 plan and just revived the name for some other activity, like syncing your download quality and network settings.
<wire name= “menu_cross_device_offline“> Set tool crossline wire>
<wire name= “pref_cross_device_offline_device_name_hint“> Enter a name for this device wire>
<wire name= “pref_cross_device_offline_error“> Error updating offline state offline wire>
<wire name= “pref_cross_device_offline_no_device_name“> Specify device name wire>
<wire name= “pref_cross_device_offline_no_gcm_registration_id“> Please try again in time wire>
<wire name= “pref_cross_device_offline_success“> State of Offline Update Tool wire>
<wire name= “pref_cross_device_offline_toggle_text“> Allow download to this tool wire>
<wire name= “save_cross_device_offline_menu“> Save wire>
We have reached out to the company to find out exactly what they plan to bring to YouTube, but we have not received a response. Instead, the UI around offline cross-device settings silently disappeared from the app for us in the meantime. It is possible that some people still have access if it is a more extensive a / b test, so be sure to update to the latest version of the YouTube app on the Play Store. We also have both beta and the stable version of APK Mirror.
