This Simple Trick Lets You Play YouTube in the Background on iOS

3.4K

I listen to a lot of YouTube videos before going to sleep or when I want to listen to my fav tracks while doing my daily chores. But unless you have a YouTube Red subscription ($10 per month and is only available in the US), you cannot play YouTube videos in the background.

So far, we have seen dozens of way to play YouTube videos in the background on Android like the apps you can install from outside Google Play Store, to playing videos on Google Chrome browser etc. But most of them don’t work on iOS.

But guess there is one simple way to play YouTube in the background for iPhone or iPad. The trick here is really simple. Start playing the YouTube video in Dolphin browser, then exit the app and resume playback via the iOS Control Center. This should resume the playback.

Follow these simple steps.

1. From your iOS device, open App Store app and download the Dolphin web browser

2. Next, go to www.youtube.com in Dolphin browser

3. Search the video you want to listen to and play it.

4. Exit the Dolphin browser (this will pause the video playback) and now you can resume playback via the iOS Control Center

And that’s it now you can play YouTube in the background on iPhone and iPad. You can multitask or turn off the screen completely and the video will play in the background.

Earlier, one could play YouTube videos in the background on iOS with the same above method using Safari browser, but that doesn’t work all the time.

The pros of using this method are – since you are not using a third-party dedicated YouTube player, Google would most likely won’t shut down this method anytime soon. Also, since you are playing YouTube videos in the browser, it also supports playlist and looping video in the background.

Related: 3 Ways to Loop YouTube Videos on Android and iOS

Although, do note that since you streaming the entire video in the background, you’ll be consuming the same amount f data as when you were watching the video. If you just want to stream the audio, then you have no option other than trying yMusic, which apparently is only available for iOS.

Also read: How to go Back to the old YouTube Layout (2017)