The YouTube app could finally be getting a sleep timer

There’s nothing sweeter than turning on a podcast in bed and setting a sleep timer so it stops playing after a while. This pretty much signifies (at least to my brain) that it’s time for sleep. And it’s a very useful feature that spares your phone from running podcast episode after podcast episode for the whole night. The YouTube app, however, doesn’t have this simple and useful feature yet. YouTube Music has it, and so does Spotify. And now, the folks over at Android Authority and app expert AssembleDebug have dug into the code of the YouTube app and have discovered references to a sleep timer.

The references show that the feature is in the works for the YouTube app, and were found in version 19.25.33 for Android. It seems it will give you an option to specify the hours and/or minutes left until playback stops. The timer can also be shown as a notification.

You will also be able to reset the timer or click done to keep watching, so you can always interfere if you want to continue watching or listening to it. For now, the functionality is still in the works and it’s not clear when it will be launched officially. Users have had to resort to using third-party apps for Android, or a system-wide timer for iPhone, to make YouTube stop playing automatically after a period of time.

Also, it would be great if the sleep timer also has the option to stop playback at the “end of video” just like YouTube Music’s “end of song”. However, there’s no evidence for this setting just yet.