Google is prepping a revamped media player for Drive on Android

Google made several improvements to the video playback experience in Google Drive last year. In addition to reducing startup times and buffering, the company rolled out an upgraded video player for Drive on desktop featuring a refreshed UI and more intuitive controls. Google now seems to be preparing to bring this upgraded video player to the Drive app for Android.

New code in the latest build of Google Drive (version 2.25.110.0) has revealed that the upgraded video player could soon reach Android users. Although the video player is unavailable to users in the current release, we’ve enabled it manually to give you an early look.

As you can see in the attached screenshot, the upgraded video player still has the progress bar at the bottom of the screen but displays more intuitive playback controls right above it. Instead of the play/pause, skip, and rewind buttons appearing in an overlay on the video, the new layout has dedicated buttons underneath the video.

Beneath the playback controls, you also get buttons to turn on captions, change the playback speed, open settings, and switch to full-screen playback. The new placement should make these buttons easier to access, as the old layout shoved them in the bottom right corner underneath the progress bar.

Although the upgraded video player is not live in the latest Google Drive build, it could roll out to users with a subsequent release. We’ll update this post as soon as it’s widely available.