YouTube Music on Android update brings a useful "Play My Station" shortcut

Google has been working on updating its apps and home-screen widgets recently and lots of widgets and apps have gotten new features or notable changes. Now, 9to5Google reports that the YouTube Music app is getting a useful "Play My Station" shortcut to replace the missing "Offline Mixtape" shortcut that was removed back in July.

YouTube Music gets useful Play My Station shortcut

The new shortcut joins "Search" at the bottom part of the app. When you tap on it, it immediately starts playing the "My Supermix" playlist, which was previously called "Your Mix". And as this is an Android app shortcut, it can be dragged and placed on your home screen if you wish to do so. The auto-playlist is now featuring the eye-catching red cover art.



This new "Play My Station" shortcut is currently rolling out via a server-side update on the YouTube Music app release 4.52. This means you can't manually update and you need to wait to receive it. For the moment, it remains to be seen how the rest of the application will implement Android 12's new Material You look.

Recent YouTube Music changes and updates

YouTube Music has been getting loads of improvements and changes recently. Previously, we reported on the fact that watching videos on YouTube Music will no longer be available for free subscribers to the service and will be reserved for paying subs.

On the other hand, the free tier of YouTube Music will still give you the option to play tracks in the background and will be supported by ads instead. For the paid subscription, which is $9.50 a month, you get music videos, unlimited skips, and an ad-free listening experience.

On phones running Android 12, YouTube Music has recently gotten a Material You-looking home screen widget. The new widget looks like a vinyl record with two icons on the top and bottom, with the play/pause button situated at the bottom, while a thumbs up like button at the top.
This change is created so it matches the Android 12 Material You redesign, which comes with a more visually pleasing experience, rounded corners, and backgrounds that match the color choice of your wallpaper.

On the other hand, for smartwatch users, the app has also been getting some update love from Google. YouTube Music has finally made its debut on Wear OS 2 smartwatches powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 3100 chipsets.

Initially, YouTube Music was added to a range of smartwatches powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 4100 and 4100+ chipsets. These smartwatches included the new Gen 6 smartwatches from Fossil and Michael Kors, Mobvoi’s TicWatch Pro 3 GPS, TicWatch Pro 3 Cellular/LTE, and TicWatch E3. And now, the new YouTube Music app is available for older smartwatches running the slightly older operating system Wear OS 2.

The updated YouTube Music Wear OS app is now available for a limited set of older smartwatches, but it will most probably be coming to more soon.

YouTube Music is getting more and more popular as we speak. Recently, the app's paid subscribers, in combination with YouTube Premium subscribers, have reached the important milestone of 50 million. The company has not disclosed how much revenue it is making from these subscribers or the average price subscribers pay for its services.