The trending tab in the YouTube Android and the iOS app found in the bottom navigation pane has finally been replaced by a new Explore tab, after almost a year of testing and development. The Explore tab is like an advanced version of the trending page where you can not just see the latest trending videos on YouTube but also browse videos from popular categories like Music, Gaming, News, Fashion and others.
Google has mentioned in the official support page for YouTube that the new change is mainly focussed on giving easy access to YouTube users to the destination pages of their choice. In this way, users would be able to access videos of different categories like Music, News, Learning, Fashion, Movies or Gaming based on their preferences in a timely manner.
This will also help in filtering and categorizing the videos so the users can easily consume the content that is of interest to them while avoiding the ones they do not like. This change also makes sure that independent creators and artists on YouTube would be more prominently displayed to the users by adding tags like creator or artist on the rise tags to their videos and displaying them before the other general trending videos on YouTube.
While the new explore tab is already visible for a lot of Android and iOS users in the YouTube app and it has replaced the trending tab, it will take a while before the change is reflected on the YouTube app of all the smartphones out there. The new update also seems to be a server-side one, so it might not appear on your YouTube app even if you update it to the latest version.
You can find out more information about the new changes and how the trending tab in YouTube works and how YouTube decides what goes in the trending and explore pages in the official YouTube support page over here.