How to Play YouTube Videos in the Background on Android

YouTube is an essential app for millions of Android users in Spain. It is also an application that improves over time, allowing its use on the phone to be more comfortable. Many users use the application to play music on their phones, either while working or on the go to work.

Although it is a good application to listen to music, we find a clear problem in it: does not let us play background music, either using other apps or having the screen turned off. It is likely that you have noticed and want to play music on YouTube in the background, being able to have the screen turned off. There are several ways to do this.

The official form that the application offers us for this is to subscribe to your paid version, that is, use YouTube Premium. Although not all users want to pay for it, so we have to find alternative ways to be able to play background music when using the application.

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Use YouTube in the browser

Because using the application is impossible, we can use the browser on Android so that this will be possible. This is a simple method, but it works well, as this will avoid having to install third-party applications. It is therefore the simplest way to achieve this on Android. To do this, we have to follow these steps:

1. Open Chrome or Firefox, your browser, on the phone.
2. Type www.youtube.com in the address bar (don’t search, it will take you to the app).
3. If you want to play playlists that you have created, log in to your account on the web.
4. Click on the three vertical dots at the top right in Chrome.
5. Click on the option «Computer Version».
6. Search and play the desired video.
7. Exit the browser and the music will continue to play.

The reason we have to use YouTube by selecting the “Computer version” option, is that when using the browser, we are taken to the mobile page of the video website. But in this version of the web it is impossible to reproduce the music in the background, so we are forced to use this method, so that it is possible to reproduce the music.

How to reduce YouTube data consumption on Android

If you want to reduce the mobile data consumption of the YouTube application on Android, there are two settings that you can modify in the application.

PiP mode

If you want to play your YouTube videos in the background, being able to use other applications that allow you to play the videos in PiP (picture in picture) mode, the well-known floating window. If they send us a link by WhatsApp or Telegram, or we send it to ourselves, we can play that video while using other applications on Android.

This is something we can do also from the YouTube application itself, as we showed you in its day. So it can be a method of playing background music when you are using the application on your phone. Since you can use other applications while playing videos in this way.

How to delete YouTube history automatically

YouTube allows you to configure the erasure of your history automatically, something that we can configure easily by following these steps.

Download YouTube Videos

Another option that will allow you to play YouTube videos The background on your Android mobile is to download these videos to your phone. There are applications on Android with which you can download these videos, we have already talked about many of them. In this way, when you play these videos with your media player or from the gallery, you can play them in the background without any problem.

It is a comfortable option, although only for some specific videos, because it is not ideal if you have to download a lot of videos, like when you want to play a playlist you’ve created in the background on your phone. So this option has clear limitations.

The entry How to play YouTube videos in the background on Android appears first in The Free Android.