An ancient resource for listen to music on your mobile from YouTube, although this obviously comes at a price: video playback, which inevitably means using more battery. Over the years we have seen different tricks to try to get around this reality, one of the most used is to use a browser to turn off the screen while reading (although sooner or later it ends up being blocked).
In fact, the browser has always been a favorite trick to avoid paying for YouTube Premium and having YouTube music without having the video, but then I discovered a free app capable of overlaying a handy black screensaver and background playback.
Its name is Black Screen and it is available for free on the Google Play Store, of course, at the price of from time to time an advertisement appears. Please note: advertising appears in the application configuration interface, but not when it is superimposed on YouTube, so it is neither annoying nor invasive and above all, there are not many of them either.
What is black screen and how does it work?
The idea is this: Black Screen does not completely turn off the screen, but rather displays a black background with the time with a very effective screen saver to save battery (if you have an AMOLED/OLED type panel) and minimize its deterioration. In this way it is possible to play both YouTube videos and content from any other application: podcasts, record videos, take selfies…
As soon as you install the application and open it, it asks you for authorization essential to its mission: be able to overlay other applications. On the next screen several options appear which we will talk about later, but for now we leave everything as is and press the fuchsia “Start” button.
At this point you will see that the screen is still on, but a small floating lock button has appeared. All you have to do is go to where you want to play something, such as a YouTube video, and start it. Then you press the lock and that’s it, the screen will go black while the sound continues to play. I insist, it can be YouTube, but also any other application.
This way you can spend as much time as you want with YouTube in the background and when you want to stop listening to music or edit playlists, just press “Unlock” and you will return to the normal screen.
And now, yes, we return to this main screen of the application where, although the default options are good, Various appearance and performance settings can be changed like clock style, floating button, how many taps you need to give the screen to wake it up, whether or not we want to hide the floating button and unlock screen. So, to avoid accidental touches, you can put three buttons to wake up, for example.
The app works well and even if it does not technically make the screen completely black, it is interesting precisely because of its ability to superimpose itself on everything.
Black screen
Video screen off
Cover | Editing with Mockuphone, Youtube icons created by Freepik – Flaticon and oto by Erik Mclean on Unsplash
In Xataka Android | You don’t need YouTube Premium to listen to music with the screen off on your Android mobile: the browser trick is second to none
