Many of us use YouTube to listen to music and discover new tracks. But it becomes very annoying when playback stops if your phone goes to sleep or you want to switch to a different task. While you can opt for YouTube Red subscription (where its available) to enable background play in the YouTube app but that's not the ideal scenario. So, we went a hunt to find the easiest way to get YouTube videos to play in the background on your Android smartphone without paying anything nor rooting your smartphone or installing any weird framework. So here's what we found.
Using Chrome Beta
The recent update to Chrome Beta app, now allows for background video playback on YouTube. All you need to do is download the Chrome Beta v54 app from the Play Store. Once you play a video and switch to a new tab, or another app, the playback will be paused. You can then just head over to the notification shade and press the play button.
That's it, videos will continue to play in the background and on opening Chrome you can catch up with the video part as well. This is the easiest solution, as you still keep using the default browser on your phone with all your bookmarks, passwords and history synced, just changing to the Beta channel instead of stable. We haven't found any major bugs in the release yet.
How to Play YouTube Videos in Background on Android
Using Firefox for Android
Another way is to switch to a different browser, now you can keep using Chrome for everything else and just play YouTube videos on Firefox. Now, this one handles background video playback more seamlessly.
Firefox just continues playing video in the background even if you minimize the app, open a new tab or switch to a different app. You don't have to tap anything in the notification shade. It just keep working in the background. You can see the video playing the tab which can be paused from there. To stop playback, just close the tab.
These were the two useful options we found for youtube background play on Android without installing several apps, or frameworks. Now, just to conclude these are the official apps and haven't been modded in any way, you can download both from the links below. If you have another nifty way, we would love to know about it, hit us in the comments.
Download (Play Store): Chrome Beta | Firefox for Android
