YouTube Blocks Background Play for Non-Premium Subscribers

Photo Credit: Christian Wiediger

YouTube has been updated so that non-Premium users can no longer access background playback by accessing a third-party browser.

YouTube’s background play feature—the ability to play only the audio of a video while in another app or while your screen is off—has long been available only to paying Premium users. But some tech-savvy mobile users have avoided paying for the privilege by simply switching to a non-Chrome-based browser. Now, YouTube seems to be taking the matter more seriously.

YouTube users on social media began reporting this week that background play no longer works on third-party browsers, including Samsung Internet, Vivaldi, Brave, and Microsoft Edge. Google has since confirmed that the change was intentional.

“We have updated the experience to ensure consistency across all our platforms,” said a Google spokesperson in a statement to Android Authority. The company reiterates that background play is intended to be a feature exclusive to YouTube Premium subscribers—but “some non-Premium users may have previously been able to access this through mobile web browsers in certain scenarios.”

To encourage more users to sign up for a Premium subscription, YouTube has enabled other changes in the past to prevent circumvention. Among these include a change in November that made those who use ad blockers on the site believe YouTube was having an outage.

YouTube Music saw a strong uptick in subscribers during Q3 2025, though the service still maintains a firm fourth place behind Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music. Theories behind this surge include that more aggressive shuttering of loopholes and workarounds is encouraging more people to pay for the service.

Meanwhile, on the television front, YouTube TV announced late last year the upcoming launch of 10-plus genre-specific packages for customers to choose the channels they want to watch. These will include a sports plan, a family-friendly plan, and an option to combine different bundles to personalize the included channels—more efforts to draw in new subscribers.