YouTube app can now play 4K HDR videos on Android devices

YouTube, our gateway to an entire multimedia world, is getting more and more features as technology advances. Sometimes, one of Google's most important apps is getting a bit behind with times when it comes to some of the features that rival apps already offer to their users, but sooner or later YouTube is forced to implement these options to match the competition.

The quality of the image YouTube offers on various platforms is strongly related to how good your internet connection is, but that mostly matters when you're watching videos on the go. As long as you have a smartphone that supports 4K resolution, you could watch YouTube videos in high-resolution, but only if your internet connection could sustain it.

Starting this week, YouTube added the same 4K resolution option to Android devices that don't actually support it. If your smartphone has a Full HD or HD resolution display, you could theoretically watch 4K videos on YouTube.

Now, that doesn't mean that the video you're watching is actually running in 4K resolution on your FHD+ display. However, videos you're watching in 4K resolution seem to have higher fidelity even when they ran on lower-resolution displays. Also, thanks to the downscale, the image is sharper, so you might have a better experience watching a video in 4K resolution on an FHD display rather than watching the same video on a lower resolution.

Google has yet confirmed the new changes, but there's a whole thread on Reddit where people discuss the benefits of having such a high-fidelity option to watch YouTube videos.