You're lying in bed, phone held precariously above your face, watching a 4K drone shot of the Swiss Alps. You want to see what the top comment says about that specific mountain range. You swipe up. Nothing happens. You swipe again, harder this time. Still nothing. It’s infuriating. Honestly, the fact that YouTube can’t scroll down in full screen occasionally feels like a personal vendetta by the developers against our collective attention spans.
It used to be so simple. You flipped your phone sideways, and the entire ecosystem of comments, related videos, and descriptions was just a flick away. Now? Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, and half the time the UI just stares back at you like you’ve asked it to solve a multivariable calculus equation.
The technical glitch vs. the feature change
Let's get one thing straight: Google messes with the YouTube UI more often than most people change their toothbrush. Sometimes, the reason you feel like YouTube can’t scroll down in full screen is because they’ve moved the goalposts on how you’re supposed to interact with the player.
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There is a massive difference between a bug and a design choice. For a long time, swiping up in full screen was the universal gesture to reveal the "more videos" panel and the comment section. Recently, YouTube has been experimenting with "Panels." Instead of a vertical scroll that feels like a natural extension of the page, they’ve introduced buttons. If you’re looking at your screen in landscape mode, you might see a small "Comments" bubble. If you don't tap that specific bubble, swiping up does absolutely nothing.
It’s clunky. It feels broken. But often, it's just a "feature" that nobody asked for.
However, there are actual bugs. In late 2024 and heading into 2025, mobile users on both iOS and Android reported a specific glitch where the gesture layer of the app simply stops registering vertical input once the video hits the landscape orientation. This isn't a design choice; it's a failure of the app to recognize that you aren't just trying to watch the video, but interact with the metadata surrounding it.
Why the app suddenly stops responding
Usually, it comes down to cache bloat. Apps like YouTube are constantly streaming data, thumbnail previews, and ad-tracking scripts. Over time, the temporary files used to manage that data get corrupted. When the cache is messy, the "overlay" (the transparent layer that sits on top of your video and listens for your touches) fails to initialize.
You might also be dealing with an "aspect ratio" conflict. If you have a phone with a weird notch or a pill-shaped camera cutout, YouTube sometimes struggles to map the touch coordinates correctly in full screen. You’re swiping at the bottom of the screen, but the app thinks you’re swiping "off-canvas."
The "Ambient Mode" Culprit
Have you noticed that weird, glowing aura around your video? That’s Ambient Mode. It’s designed to make the viewing experience more immersive by bleeding the colors of the video into the UI background. It’s pretty. It’s also a resource hog. On mid-range or older devices, Ambient Mode can cause enough micro-lag that the "swipe to scroll" gesture gets dropped by the processor.
If you find that your YouTube can’t scroll down in full screen, try turning off Ambient Mode. Tap the settings gear while a video is playing, go to Additional Settings, and toggle it off. You’d be surprised how often removing a purely cosmetic lighting effect restores the basic functionality of the app.
Breaking down the browser vs. app experience
If you’re on a desktop, the "can't scroll" issue is a whole different beast. Usually, it’s a conflict with an extension. We all use them. Ad-blockers, "Return YouTube Dislike" buttons, or cinematic lighting plugins. These scripts inject code directly into the YouTube player. When YouTube updates its site—which happens almost weekly—those extensions break.
When an extension breaks, it often "locks" the scroll position. You’re hitting your mouse wheel, but the browser thinks you’re still focused on the video player element, which doesn't have a scrollbar.
On mobile, it’s almost always a versioning issue. If you’re a part of the YouTube Beta program on the Google Play Store, you are essentially a guinea pig. You get the new features first, but you also get the bugs where the UI elements just... vanish.
Real-world fixes that actually work
Don't just restart your phone. That's the "is it plugged in?" of tech advice. We can do better.
First, check your zoom level. On modern iPhones and many Samsung devices, you can "pinch to zoom" to fill the entire screen, cropping out the black bars. For some reason, when you are in "Zoomed to Fill" mode, the swipe-up gesture to see comments often becomes unresponsive. Pinch back out to the original aspect ratio and then try swiping up. It’s a stupid bug, but it exists.
Second, force stop the app. On Android, go to Settings > Apps > YouTube > Force Stop. This kills the background processes that might be hanging. On iOS, swipe up from the bottom, find the YouTube card, and flick it away into the void.
Third, check the "Picture-in-Picture" settings. Sometimes the app gets "stuck" thinking it's about to transition into a small floating window. This state disables the full-screen scroll because it’s preparing to shrink the player. Toggling PiP off and back on in your system settings can reset this logic.
The "Modified App" Factor
Look, we know people use third-party versions of YouTube. Whether it's Revanced or other iterations designed to bring back old features, these apps are notorious for breaking when YouTube changes its API. If you are using a modified APK and find that YouTube can’t scroll down in full screen, the fix isn't in your settings. It's in the patches. You likely need to update your microG or the ReVanced manager to a version that supports the new UI layout Google pushed.
Browsing in Safari or Chrome on Mobile
If you refuse to use the app and prefer the mobile browser version, you're in for a rough time. Google intentionally makes the mobile web experience slightly worse to nudge you toward the app. In the mobile web version, "full screen" uses the native OS video player (especially on iOS). The native Apple video player does not support scrolling down to see YouTube comments. You are locked into the video. To see comments, you have to exit full screen. There is no workaround for this because it's a limitation of the browser's video container, not a bug in the code.
Why the "Comments" move matters
There is a psychological component to why this glitch is so annoying. We’ve been conditioned to "multi-task" our entertainment. We don't just watch; we react. When the scroll fails, it severs the social connection of the platform.
YouTube’s internal data shows that engagement drops significantly when users have to exit full screen to interact. This is why they keep messing with the layout—they are trying to find a way to keep you in that immersive, horizontal view while still feeding you ads and "next up" suggestions. Every time they change the "hook" for how the scroll works, millions of users think their app is broken.
Immediate steps to take right now
If you are currently stuck and can't see your comments, do these steps in this exact order:
- Check for an update. Go to the App Store or Play Store. If there is an "Update" button, hit it. Google often pushes "hotfixes" for UI bugs within 48 hours.
- Toggle Portrait Orientation Lock. Sometimes your phone's gyroscope gets confused. Turn off your orientation lock, rotate the phone to portrait, scroll down, then rotate back to landscape. This often "re-syncs" the scroll position.
- Clear the app cache. On Android, this is in the storage settings for the app. On iOS, you unfortunately have to delete and reinstall the app to truly clear the cache.
- Check your "Display" settings. If you have "Touch Sensitivity" turned up or a screen protector mode on, it might be interfering with edge-swipes.
- Disable "Stay on Screen" or "Guided Access" features. These accessibility tools can lock the screen interaction to a single element—in this case, the video player—preventing you from scrolling "away" from the video.
It’s unlikely that your hardware is failing. This is almost exclusively a software handshake issue between the YouTube app’s custom UI and your phone’s operating system.
If all else fails, try logging out and back in. It sounds like a cliché, but YouTube often ties UI "experiments" to specific accounts. Logging out can sometimes pull you out of a "test group" that has a buggy interface and put you back into the stable, standard version of the app.
The reality is that as long as YouTube keeps chasing the "perfect" layout for ad placement and engagement, the full-screen experience will remain volatile. You just have to know which buttons to push when the code starts tripping over itself.