The auto-play functionality for videos on both mobile and desktops has been available for quite some time now. Previously, these videos auto-played with audio disabled, and you had to click on them to hear it. Users could also navigate to their settings to disable this feature.
Now, Facebook has introduced
a change which enables audio by default in auto-played videos. The company says that it experimented this change on some news feeds and received "positive feedback". That said, if your phone is on silent mode, the app will detect it as such and sounds will not be played for videos. However, if this is not the case, then the audio will play at the current media volume of the device. Thankfully, users also have the ability to toggle off this functionality altogether.
Moreover, the layout of vertical videos has also been updated. The company claims that it tested a larger preview of vertical videos on some apps and when it received a satisfactory response, it decided to include this change as well. Similarly, if you ever wished to scroll and watch a video at the same time, Facebook has now made this possible too. You can minimize a video to any of the four corners of screen in picture-in-picture view mode and then keep scrolling through your news feed. The video keeps playing even if you close the app on an Android device.