An ancient source for Listening to music on your mobile phone pulls YouTubeAlthough obviously this comes at a cost: video playback, which inevitably means using more battery. Over the years we have seen different tricks to circumvent this fact; One of the most common is to use a browser to turn off the screen during full playback (although it will eventually be blocked).

Actually the browser was always a favorite trick to avoid paying for YouTube Premium and having YouTube music without owning the video, but then I discovered this: a free app that can cover a practical black screen protector and background playback.

It’s called Black Screen and it’s available for free on the Google Play Store, of course. An ad pops up every now and then.. Note: Ads appear in the app’s configuration interface, but not when added to YouTube, so they’re neither annoying nor invasive, and best of all, there aren’t many of them.

What is Black Screen and how does it work?

The idea is that the Black Screen doesn’t completely cover the screen, but instead shows a black background with a very effective screen protector To save battery (if you have an AMOLED/OLED type panel) and minimize its degradation. This way it is possible to play both YouTube videos and content from any other application: podcasts, recording videos, taking selfies…

As soon as you install and open the application, it asks for a permission required for its task: Overlaying other applications. On the next screen, a few options appear, which we will talk about later, but for now we leave everything as is and press the fuchsia colored ‘Start’ button.

At this point you will see that the screen is still on but a small floating lock button has appeared. Now you just go to where you want to play something, say a YouTube video, and start it. You then tap the lock and that’s it, the screen will go dark while the audio continues to play. I insist, this could be YouTube or any other application.

This way you can spend as much time as you want with YouTube playing in the background, and when you want to stop listening to music or switch playlists, just tap ‘Unlock’ and you’ll be fine. You will return to the normal screen.

And now we return to the main screen of the application, although yes, the default options are fine. Various appearance and performance parameters can be changed such as the style of the watch, the floating button, how many times you need to tap to wake up the screen, whether we want to hide the floating button and the unlock screen. So we can put three taps to wake up, for example, to prevent accidental taps.

App works fine and although it doesn’t technically turn the screen completely black, it is interesting precisely because of its ability to superimpose itself on everything.

Black screen

Video screen is off

Download for free

Cover | Freepik – Mockuphone, montage with Youtube icons created by Erik Mclean on Unsplash by Flaticon and oto

Xataka on Android | You don’t need YouTube Premium to listen to music with the screen off on your Android mobile: browser trick is unbeatable