YouTube Music tries out a new look for smart downloads

With its latest update, sparkles are in, lightning bolts are out

Not every UI change has to be some big and bold reinvention of the wheel. Sometimes, in-app icons need to be tweaked to better represent a feature or match up with the current look and feel of the overall design. Google recently tweaked how its smart downloads look in YouTube Music, delivering a small change to an important icon in the app.

If you head into YouTube Music's smart downloads menu on the latest version of the app, you'll spot a new sparkle icon where the old lightning icon once sat (via 9to5Google). Smart downloads launched back in 2019, making it easy for listeners to always ensure they have plenty of jams for when they're off the grid or in the air. Since its earliest days in YouTube Music, the app has displayed a lightning bolt icon next to any playlists and mixes with smart downloads enabled. As of this week, that's no longer the case.

Left: New sparkle icon. Right: Old lightning bolt icon.

This new sparkle icon doesn't change anything about how the feature works, but it's definitely an interesting tweak to a three-year-old feature. Meanwhile, manually downloaded content still shows the typical down-arrow icon. We've spotted the change on YouTube Music v5.02.50, which first started rolling out to users last week.