Unless you’re a subscriber to YouTube premium or YouTube music, your ability to listen to a YouTube video in the background is limited – doable, but limited.

Android users can listen to almost any YouTube video while you’re reading your tweets or checking out the latest news. Recent versions of the Android YouTube app allow you to use picture-in-picture (PIP) to view (or listen to) almost any video.

We’ll look at a workaround for music videos in Android – and for iPhone users as well. Pip feature is for YouTube in Android.

If you tap the center of the video, a small box will appear. A small’X’ box will stop the video and banish the box.

Pip will not work if you try to play anything classified as a music video. For that, you need to be a subscriber to YouTube music or YouTube premium.

You can play a single track in the background on both an Android phone and an iPhone – but it’s a bit fiddly. When I tried it on a phone running Android 10, the same song kept repeating, while on an iPhone running iOS 13, the music simply stopped.

How to play music in the background of your mobile device. Here’s how to use the music in your device’s background.

This method works in Chrome and may work in other mobile browsers as well as other browsers as mobile browsers. I first saw written up in digital trends in Chrome.

Playing a free YouTube video – any video – on an iPhone is even more difficult. Some methods that previously worked were hammered by iOS 13. I finally found a method that actually works in a video produced by Daniel about tech.

I had no trouble playing a single video in the background using this method. If you go back into Safari and restart the video, it should play. But I was unable to play more than a single track.