Some Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra owners are reporting a frustrating YouTube bug that won't quit

Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra owners have been reporting for weeks that YouTube videos freeze while the audio keeps playing, usually right after they leave the app and come back to it. A few Galaxy S26 Ultra owners say they're seeing it too, which isn't what you'd expect from one of the best foldable phones, especially at $2,100.

Where the Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra YouTube reports are coming from

The complaints started piling up in a thread on Samsung's Korean-language community forum, where the original poster said YouTube froze on their Z Fold 8 Ultra about half the time they switched away from the app and came back. Around a dozen other commenters have chimed in since with the same problem, and while most of them own the Fold 8 Ultra, a few say it happens on the regular Galaxy Z Fold 8 and the Galaxy S26 Ultra as well.

Since the thread is in Korean, the details come to us through machine translation, so some of the finer points may be slightly off. So far, neither Samsung nor Google has responded to the thread.

Fold 8 owners on Reddit are describing more than one YouTube bug

The Fold 8 Ultra is built around multitasking, and jumping out of YouTube to answer a message before jumping back in is something most of us do dozens of times a day. That makes this bug hit the Fold 8 Ultra right where it counts, and it's not the first rough patch for Samsung's new foldables either, since we covered reports of Fold 8 displays bending just a few weeks ago.

I went through r/GalaxyFold to see how widespread this looks, and the most active thread I found, posted about a month ago with around 30 comments, describes the exact same frozen video with the sound still playing. Not every report matches, though.

One owner describes YouTube looping the last 10 seconds of a video endlessly, while the earliest post I came across, from about two months ago, was about videos stopping with the screen off, which another user solved by turning off battery optimization for YouTube. Still, the frustration is real, with one Fold 8 owner commenting under an r/technology post about the bug that they have to restart YouTube multiple times before playback recovers.

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