The YouTube Gaming app, launched in June last year in the US and UK, is now available in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland, and will come to “many more countries” soon.

The iOS and Android app has also been updated with simplified homepage navigation, updated game and channel browsing, and a new “live” tab.

An Android live stream player will join the existing iOS and the HTML5 desktop players with “an upgrade to support quality switching, 60fps playback and DVR mode”.

And Android users will also be able to pop out the YouTube Gaming player to keep it visible above other apps on their device.

“The YouTube Gaming team has been on a six-month speedrun,” wrote product manager Alan Joyce in a blog post, adding that since its launch, the team has enabled mobile capture, to record and live stream mobile gameplay directly from Android devices.

It also introduced sponsorships in beta, which makes it easy for users to back their favourite gamers while receiving perks including a live chat badge chosen by the creator and access to exclusive chat sessions.

The idea behind the app is to give more than 25,000 games their own home, “a single place for all the best videos and live streams about that title”.