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YouTube adds some basic subscription filters on iOS to make your backlog less intimidating

YouTube adds some basic subscription filters on iOS to make your backlog less intimidating

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They’re coming to Android “in the future”

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The YouTube logo on a black background
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Google is introducing filters to the Subscriptions tab on its iOS app today, to make it less intimidating to figure out what to watch next (via 9to5Google). The company says it plans to bring them to Android phones “in the future.” The filters exist to help users more easily order their unwatched videos from channels they subscribe to — and could be particularly helpful for people who subscribe to a lot of channels.

With the filters, users can opt to view videos from all their subscriptions at once, videos posted today, videos they may have started but then bounced away from, ones from subscriptions they haven’t watched at all, live videos from channels they subscribe to, or just see a list of those short posts made by YouTube channels that look kind of like tweets. By tapping a filter, users will see a reverse chronological list of videos that match that filter.

Here’s what the filters look like in the updated app, which I got to see for myself today:

The filters aren’t mandatory, though. People who don’t use them will have their subscriptions default to the reverse chronological list of every video from every channel they’ve subscribed to — just like they always have.

But the available filters are pretty basic, and I can think of a few potential options that are missing here. Being able to filter subscriptions by category or length, for example, would make these more useful. Hopefully Google adds more filters in the future.