In the world of online video streaming, Youtube is a beast. The online video giant has become the world’s third most visited website after Google and Facebook. But one fact that annoys most of the YouTube users is its inability to play videos in the background. If you’re watching a movie or listening to a song and you switch to another app, you’ll find that the video or audio has stopped playing. What if you can play YouTube videos in background and surf the web side by side.
Yes, you heard it right. It’s now possible to play YouTube in background on your smartphone, regardless of the type of device you’re using. You can go about it in the following ways:
Play YouTube videos in background on iOS:
- Go to Safari app on your iOS device and open YouTube’s website
- Look for the video that you want to be played in the background
- Tap the play button to pause the video and then leave the app
- Go to Control Center by swiping up from the bottom of screen
- Then hit the play button
Now you can easily play YouTube videos in background on iOS while doing some other task on your device. This is really helpful, but for this to function properly you’ll have to uninstall the YouTube app, otherwise Safari browser will automatically redirect you to the Youtube app.
However, if you’re not willing to uninstall the YouTube app there’s one more way to play YouTube videos in background. Just open YouTube site in Google Chrome browser and follow the same steps as above.
Play YouTube videos in background on Android
On some Android phones, you can use Google’s audio notification to resume playback after you’ve left the app. However, this doesn’t work on all Android devices. Thereby, using Firefox on Android is the only solution to play YouTube videos in background.
Get YouTube videos to play in the background on Android with these 3 easy steps:
- Open the Mozilla Firefox browser and go to YouTube’s website
- Search for the video or song you want to play
- Tap on the Play button and leave the app. The selected video should continue playing in the background
With the ability to manage running playlists, Firefox on Android does the better job than Firefox/Safari on iOS. Using Firefox on Android to play YouTube videos in background is quite useful, especially if you use YouTube for extended listening sessions like during a house party and while traveling.
Also read: How to play YouTube videos in VLC media player

