This Simple Trick Lets You Play YouTube in the Background on iOS.
I listen to a lot of YouTube videos before bed or when I want to listen to my favorite tracks while doing my day to day activities. But if you don’t have a YouTube Red subscription ($ 10 per month and only available in the US), you can’t play YouTube videos in the background.
So far, we’ve seen dozens of ways to play YouTube videos in the background on Android, such as apps that can be installed outside the Google Play store, play videos in the Google Chrome browser, etc. But most of them don’t work on iOS.
But guess what, there is one easy way to play YouTube in the background for iPhone or iPad. The trick here is really simple. Start playing YouTube videos in the Dolphin browser, then exit the app and resume playback through the iOS Control Center. This should resume playback.
Follow these simple steps.
1. On an iOS device, open the App Store app and download the Dolphin web browser.
2. Then go to www.youtube.com in your Dolphin browser.
3. Find the video you want to listen to and play it.
4. Close Dolphin Browser (video playback will pause) and you can now resume playback via iOS Control Center
That’s it, you can now play YouTube in the background on iPhone and iPad. You can perform multiple tasks at the same time or turn off the screen completely and the video will play in the background.
It used to be possible to play YouTube videos in the background on iOS using the same method described above in the Safari browser, but that doesn’t always work.
The upsides of using this method are that since you’re not using a third-party dedicated YouTube player, Google most likely won’t turn off this method any time soon. In addition, since you play YouTube videos in the browser, it also supports playlist and looping videos in the background.
Related: 3 Ways to Loop YouTube Videos on Android and iOS
Note, however, that since you are streaming all videos in the background, you are consuming the same amount of data as watching the video. If you just want to stream audio, you have no choice but to try yMusic, which is apparently only available for iOS.