MUMBAI: YouTube has officially launched ‘Incognito Mode’ on the Android version of the app, which let the users watch videos without affecting their viewing history or recommendations. It started testing the feature back in May, and now it's rolling out to all Android users. The feature can be activated by selecting the ‘Turn on Incognito Mode’ option from the account section of the application.

To enable the incognito mode, users have to make sure that they have the latest, updated version of the YouTube app. Then they need to tap their profile picture at the top right corner and go to account settings to turn on incognito. After watching a video is done, at the bottom it shows a black bar with some text indicating incognito mode is active. When the users turn off Incognito or become inactive, their activity from this session will be cleared and they will return to the account last used.

The user can only access ‘home’ and ‘trending’ parts of the app while using this mode. Subscriptions, inbox and library aren’t available. The user cannot bookmark videos while watching using incognito, though one can switch off the incognito mode while viewing a video to bookmark the video. Therefore, the incognito mode doesn’t turn out to be really useful when YouTube has an option to pause search and view history while staying logged in.

YouTube launched YouTube Music and YouTube Premium subscriptions this Tuesday across 17 countries. Last month it announced that it is going to replace YouTube Red which was only available in a few countries with YouTube Premium which will be expanded to other countries as well. The Premium service is not yet available in India.