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Comment by schuke | Hacker News Reader

Multitasking reminds me of the Windows 8 fiasco. Terrible discoverability, compounded by the fact not all apps can be multitasked by dragging from dock. Very confusing and inconsistent behavior. Personally I haven’t come across any situation where multitasking on iPad is actually more efficient and pleasant to use.

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For me, it is finding a music video I like, and then clicking another tab to read something. Now the music stopped. I'd like at least enough multitasking to allow that. Otherwise, we're weirdly back to something akin to the old DOS days... just prettier.

Background tabs keep playing audio for me, but only one thing at a time can play audio. Maybe it's a case of ads being able to steal media focus?

That used to happen to me all the time, but it's feels like it's gotten better in 13.

Usually if I want to make sure a video stays active I'll put it in PiP mode. You can throw it off to the side, but then it's easy to pull back up and start if something interrupts it. Not ideal, but not a huge inconvenience either.

Might be because YouTube only allows background playback if you pay for Premium?

You can work around that with Firefox and this addon[0].

The whole Page Visibility API was a mistake to me. Under no circumstance I can think of I want a website to know if I am looking at it or not. In this case, I consider it to be plainly abused and turned user-hostile.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-backgro...

All browsers on iOS have to use the same engine, though, so you can't use Firefox add-ons there.

Don't know how it is on iPads, but on Android background audio from YouTube is a feature unlocked by subscribing to YouTube Premium.

...or installing newpipe (from f-droid) or similar.

That may be the case then. My desktops don't have that problem. A tablet-specific "feature."

It used to be disabled so Google could demonstrate how bad iOS was at multi-tasking (while a background audio API was available for a very long time), nowadays it’s disabled on both platforms because they want to sell premium.

TLDR: corporate greed

That’s on YouTube.

Same on iOS. I would have to pay around 20 USD / month for YouTube Premium.

I pay 17.99 Euro for a 'Family' subscription, not for the background option, but simply because on the one hand I want to signal encouragement for an internet model not relying exclusively on advertisement and selling your data, and on the other hand having to play the watch-add/skip-but-not-until-you-have-been-exposed-enough just to watch a video each time is horrible.

On iPadOS it seems that you can play YouTube in the background again (previously YouTube blocked this on mobile, I guess the fact that iPadOS pretends to be a desktop browser nullifies this!), but you do have to resume playback from the “now playing” widget once the YouTube window goes into the background. The easiest way I’ve found to do this is to swipe down control center from the top right, then press the Play icon in the Now Playing widget.

If you turn the screen off, the audio gets cut off pretty quickly, though.

If someone made something that'd let me play YouTube in the background, I'd jump on it! Was thinking of using Pythonista and youtube-dl, but that got sidetracked.

Background play is a Premium subscription feature on YouTube.

All apps will have to support multitasking soon.

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