Google confirmed it is closing free YouTube background playback loopholes

Most users tend to associate and purchase YouTube Premium to remove ads on the popular platform. However, there are a few other features Google locks behind that paywall as well. Most notably – background playback.

That said, for quite some time now, crafty developers and their respective users have enjoyed ways of getting the feature for free. The simplest approach was to use a third-party browser like Samsung Internet, Brave or Vivaldi (to name a few) to play content in the background. After an avalanche of user reports over the past few days, Google has finally confirmed that it is cracking down on such loopholes for background playback.

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.

We aren’t quite sure how many users this change affects, but it is Google’s prerogative to take such actions. Before you start blowing up the comments, we do know there are other existing workarounds to get background playback. We won’t be discussing any of those for obvious reasons, but most, if not all, require a lot more effort than simply opening up a browser, so Google likely achieved its goals with this move.

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