Android is all too eager to help you start some music playing, but what to you do if you don't want to keep it playing forever — whether you fear you're at risk of wandering off or drifting off? You could use automation apps like Tasker or install a dedicated third-party app, but nothing beats a native sleep timer. YouTube Music could soon be getting just that, making it your ideal companion during breaks, workouts, or whenever you only want to listen for so long.

The latest update to YouTube Music adds support for the new Android 13 media player. But in addition to visible changes like that, there's also work on new functionality behind the scenes, and 9to5Google discovered some text while doing an APK teardown that could suggest that a sleep timer feature is in the works.

res/layout/timer_status_bottom_sheet.xml

While that doesn't give us much to work with, the file name there could refer to a sleep timer arriving as part of the playback controls on the app, as a bottom sheet. 9to5 speculates a little about how the interface might appear, and that we could access it through an overflow menu, but we haven't really seen any evidence one way or the other just yet.

Some seemingly related strings in the APK suggest we'll be able to interact with timers by adding five minutes to an active one, or canceling it outright.

<string name=”add_five_minutes”>five minutes</string>

<string name=”timer_cancel”>cancel timer</string>

Back in the day, Google Play Music featured a sleep timer, so music automatically paused at a preset user-defined time. The option was available in the main settings menu, but wasn’t the easiest to get to and use. We hope YouTube Music's eventual implementation arrives a little more polished.

So far, none of this is officially confirmed, and the implementation and specifics could change wildly before it arrives — assuming it ever does. If you need a sleep timer for your music immediately, Spotify has one.