How To Play YouTube Videos in Background on your Android Smartphone

Have you ever wanted to stream YouTube videos in the background? Since, we all know that official YouTube app doesn’t allow you to play video in the background, meaning you can’t minimize the window and let your videos play in the background. Though you can do that in a dedicated YouTube Music app that was launched last year, but as the name suggests it would have curated content related to music only. And moreover, it’s available in conjunction with YouTube RED app, which is the ad-free premium app launched in on handful of countries.

But what if you just want any music video to play in the background, or even want to listen to a podcast, then it would make sense to have such feature on the main YouTube app as well. Unfortunately, that has not happened yet. Moreover, the dedicated YouTube Music app is not available in every country and even restricted to some limited devices. So, here comes a neat little trick that would enable the YouTube playing in the background.

There is a neat little trick we found, or say a bug, using Google Chrome browser which allows you to leave video playing in the background. We are sharing the simple instructions below; so that you can also have fun with this trick while it last.

1. Make sure the notifications are enabled for Chrome. To do that you have to head over to the Settings, then Apps, find the Chrome browser and tap on it.
2. There you’ll have to enable notifications options, especially the Floating notifications and Lock screen notifications.
3. Launch the Google Chrome browser from your app drawer.
4. Enter the URL to navigate to the YouTube website and play any video you want to.
5. Now pause the video and open a new tab on browser.
6. Access the notification shade, there you’ll find a volume icon appear, hit play and you can continue to listen to the video in the background.

What’s more interesting is that if you have enabled the lock screen notifications for the Google Chrome as we said you to in the second step, well, then you’re in for a much larger treat. Now you don’t have to keep the device’s screen awake in order to listen to hours of music on YouTube or listen to the podcast.

With this neat little trick, you can have as much as the time of YouTube streaming without keeping the screen awake, thus saving the battery life of your device as well. Isn’t that what you call killing two birds with one stone, but here we are rather not killing birds, but enjoying music at the convenience of not losing battery life as much as faster when the screen is awake.

Though, you should know that it won’t be supported on some handsets. Let us know in the comments section if you were able to use this trick and play YouTube video in the background or not.