YouTube has disabled the ability to watch videos in the background on smartphones. With a couple of tricks, however, you can restore the function
Although there are dozens of streaming services to listen to music and podcasts online, many people use YoutTube to watch music videos or listen to the words of the many popularizers who now populate the streaming video platform weblog Google. This choice, however, is now very inconvenient because YouTube no longer allows you to watch videos in the background on smartphones.
The function, in fact, is now the prerogative of YouTube Premium and consequently to see YouTube videos in the background or while the smartphone screen is off in theory we have to pay to subscribe to the service. There is, however, a free way to watch YouTube videos in the background, a trick that passes through another popular application: Telegram.
Tramite Telegram, in fact, you can get around the limitations of YouTube free although, we must admit, the procedure is not at all comfortable and is itself limited to playing one video at a time. Then there is a second trick, which works even better, that goes through the Chrome browser for Android instead.
How to watch YouTube videos in the background on Telegram
To watch YouTube in the background we have to install Telegram on our smartphone and start a chat with ourselves (or with Telegram). Inside this chat we then have to paste the link to the YouTube video we want to watch in the background and, immediately after, click on the video to make play.
At this point Telegram asks us if we want to watch the video on YouTube (and then exit the app to switch to the YouTube one) or directly inside the app via the Pictrure in Picture (PiP) feature. Choosing the latter option will ask us to give permission to Telegram to play the videos with PiP. After giving the ok all we have to do is go back to the video link and play it with the newly enabled feature. When the video is playing, at this point, just lock the screen to continue playing the video in the background.
How to watch YouTube videos in the background on Chrome
The second ploy to watch YouTube videos in the background on Android smartphones is instead based on Chrome. Just open the video you want to watch on the mobile version of YouTube, using the Chrome browser, and then choose the desktop view from the menu with the three dots in the top right corner.
At this point all you have to do is go back to the Home. YouTube playback will be interrupted, but lowering the notification curtain we’ll see a small player from which we can control the start and pause of the video, but also jump from one track to another (great if we want to play music playlists in the background). Once we restart the video from the notification area it will not stop anymore, even if we lock the phone.