YouTube's nav bar pulled a Houdini on Android, but it's back now

The YouTube app on Android was suffering from a missing navigation bar after a bug caused it to vanish into thin air like a puff of smoke in a windstorm. Naturally, this would be causing some fairly inconvenient user experiences. After all, the navigation bar is the main way you get around the app. Obviously, the app wasn’t completely unusable. You could still access the category filters at the top, and you could always search for something specific with the search button. You could also still scroll through whatever was on the main page until you found something you wanted to watch.

Having said that, a lot of other main functions were simply gone. The profile page where you find watch history, gone. The shorts tab, gone. If you wanted to directly access these parts of the YouTube app, you were unable to do so via the nav bar. Luckily, Google was quick to acknowledge the bug and its resulting issue and began investigating the problem.

The missing navigation bar issue in the YouTube app has now been fixed

This issue that caused the navigation bar to disappear seems to have initially popped up on the YouTube Help forums a little over 20 hours ago. So, users were left without access to this part of the app for close to a full day.

Google has worked quickly to find the cause of the bug and fix the problem. The company has also now posted an update, as of about 4 hours ago, that the bug was fixed. If you were experiencing this problem with the navigation bar having gone missing in the YouTube app, you should now be able to see it at the bottom where it normally sits.

Free tier users seem to have had the most issues

Now that Google says the bug has been fixed, most or all users should have access to the navigation bar again. While the bug was still present, however, it’s reported that free tier users seemed to be experiencing the bug the most.

As 9To5Google notes, some premium subscribers may have experienced the bug as well, but the majority of them seemed to be users who access YouTube without the premium subscription. All of that likely doesn’t matter much now that the bug is fixed.

Having said that, it’s good information to have anyway, just in case the bug persists for you. If that happens to be the case, you’re urged to contact Google on the YouTube Help forums by replying directly to the post about the bug. You can access that post here.

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This article first appeared on Android Headlines