YouTube Is Moving Subscriptions Out of the Bottom Bar. Here’s Where to Find It Now

For close to a decade, the Subscriptions button has sat in the same spot on YouTube’s phone app: fourth from the left in the bottom bar, one tap away. It’s moving. YouTube confirmed on October 22 that it is pulling Subscriptions out of the bottom bar on Android and iOS and moving it into a new row of feeds at the top of the Home tab, where it now goes by the shorter name Subs.

The change arrives alongside a bigger feature YouTube clearly cares more about: custom feeds, a way to build your own Home tab by describing what you want to watch in plain English. YouTube calls the package the start of “a series of updates to shape a more seamless Home experience.” Whether it feels seamless depends a lot on how you use the app.

What’s changing in the YouTube app

Once the update reaches your phone, the bottom bar has four items: Home, Shorts, Create and You. Subscriptions is no longer one of them. Instead, open Home and look at the strip along the top. Home comes first, then Subs, marked with a red underline when you’re on it, according to 9to5Google. After that come dedicated feeds for Live and Music. A Movies & TV feed shows up only if you pay for something that lives there, such as a Primetime Channels add-on.

Two other things go away in the process. The topic chips that used to run along the top of Home on mobile are being replaced by custom feeds, and iGeeksBlog and 9to5Google both report that YouTube’s slide-out navigation drawer is gone too.

Your subscription feed itself hasn’t changed. It still shows new uploads from the channels you follow. It just takes two taps to reach instead of one.

Custom feeds: the part YouTube actually wants you to try

Tap the + at the top of Home and you get a prompt box. Describe a topic, a type of video or a mood, and YouTube builds a feed around it that keeps filling up as new videos are posted. YouTube’s own example is “help me unwind after work with guided meditations under 10 minutes.” The company describes the results as feeds that “go beyond simple keyword searches,” which is a fair way to put it: these are saved searches that keep updating, with YouTube’s recommendation engine doing the filtering.

Each feed you save gets its own tab in that top row, after Home and Subs. Every feed has a prompt box at the top, so you can adjust it later instead of starting over, and you can delete one at any time. A few details matter if you plan to use them a lot:

• Feeds sync between the phone app and desktop.
• They’re private to you.
• A feed you don’t open for 30 days expires, per iGeeksBlog.
• What you watch inside a custom feed counts toward your regular watch history, so it can shape your main Home recommendations too.

There’s also a cap, and it’s where YouTube Premium comes in.

Three feeds is enough for most people. If you want separate feeds for cooking, woodworking, F1 and late-night video essays, you’ll hit the free limit fast.

Who gets it, and when

Custom feeds are rolling out first to signed-in viewers in the U.S. who are 13 or older and use English as their language setting, on mobile and desktop. You also need watch history and search history turned on, which makes sense given how the feeds work. YouTube says more countries will follow but hasn’t given dates.

The new top bar is “starting to roll out in the US,” according to Android Authority. Digital Trends describes the top-bar change as a test YouTube is expanding. YouTube itself hasn’t said when every Android and iPhone user will have the new bottom bar. Like most YouTube interface changes, expect it to show up on some phones days or weeks before others. You can’t force it, but keeping the YouTube app updated from the Play Store is the only thing that helps.

How to find your subscriptions after the update

1. Open the YouTube app and tap Home in the bottom bar.
2. Look at the row of feeds at the top of the screen.
3. Tap Subs, second from the left. Your subscription feed works exactly as before.

How to make your first custom feed

1. On the Home tab, tap the + at the end of the top row of feeds.
2. Describe what you want in a sentence. Specific works better: “Android phone reviews from the last month, no unboxing videos” beats “phones.”
3. Save it. It now lives as its own tab in the top row.
4. To tweak it later, open the feed and edit the prompt at the top.

If you don’t see the + button, the feature hasn’t reached your account yet, or your watch or search history is paused.

Our take: a smart feature, an awkward trade

Custom feeds are a good idea. YouTube’s algorithm has always been a black box that you steer by watching and disliking things, and a text box that says “show me this” is a more honest way to control it. The 3-versus-8 split is a reasonable nudge toward Premium rather than a paywall.

Burying Subscriptions is harder to cheer. That feed is how a lot of people actually use YouTube: you follow creators, you check what they’ve posted. Turning it into a tab inside Home tells you which part of the app YouTube wants you to look at first, and it isn’t the channels you chose to follow. It’s the recommendations, Shorts and now feeds YouTube helps build. Heavy subscription users will get used to the extra tap. Creators who rely on subscribers seeing their uploads may notice it more.

The upside is that your subscriptions aren’t going anywhere. The feed is all still there, working the way it always has. It just moved up the screen.

Sources: 9to5Google, Android Authority, Digital Trends, iGeeksBlog. Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash.