Users have been trying to access YouTube Premium features for so long that it turned into an unofficial competition with Google. YouTube locks something behind a paywall, creative power users come up with a way to bypass the restrictions, YouTube patches the “hole,” and the cycle repeats.
One of the YouTube Premium features that’s been sought the most by free users is background play, which is only available to Premium subscribers. Free users were using various third-party browsers and extensions to trick YouTube into playing in the background.
But it looks like those days are coming to an end, as Google seems to have patched the loophole that allowed for background play on external browsers such as Brave or Microsoft Edge. If you try this on your phone right now, chances are, YouTube will stop playing as soon as you leave the browser or turn off your screen.
This appears to be true for Premium subscribers, too. Google was probably so strict on patching this that it possibly disabled background play in external browsers for everyone, regardless of the subscription tier.
I’m a YouTube Premium subscriber, and I tested this myself. At first, when I opened a YouTube video in Safari on my iPhone, it immediately stopped playing when I switched back to the Home Screen. However, I found a partial workaround: when I turned off my screen during playback while still in Safari, the video would stop playing, but YouTube playback controls would appear on the Lock Screen. I could resume the video from the Lock Screen, even when I’m outside Safari, and the video would keep playing.
So, there is a partial workaround for Safari. But I assume most YouTube Premium subscribers use the official app anyway, and this “trick” would probably be of no use to them.
Google actually confirmed this in a statement to GSMArena:
“Background playback is a feature intended to be exclusive for YouTube Premium members. While some non-Premium users may have previously been able to access this through mobile web browsers in certain scenarios, we have updated the experience to ensure consistency across all our platforms.”
So, there you have it. If you used external browsers for playing YouTube videos in the background, Google has caught up. Although, as I mentioned above, this has been an unofficial competition between Google and keen power users, so I doubt the latter will settle down for this. Google already made its move, it’s people’s turn now.
Via: 9to5Google