YouTube Red is here. I’ll admit, I haven’t kept up with it too much because, frankly, I don’t think I’ve ever used YouTube to listen to music. I have other means for that type of content delivery.

However, I recently heard a very disturbing report: Google is forcing third-party YouTube app developers to remove background audio (and, presumably, iOS 9 multitasking support?) from their apps. This bothers me greatly.

I don’t use YouTube to listen to music, but I do stream a TON of content from YouTube. I have dozens of subscriptions that envelope video Podcasts, Reviews, Discussions, Impressions, as well as ASMR videos. These are all types of content that I love to listen to, but none of them truly require my active attention to a video. Maybe sometimes I will choose to look at the video while listening but most of the time I would prefer to do other things while listening to this content. This is all independent of my podcast listening but, in practice, I treat all of this content as de facto podcasts. The only problem is that none of these content creators maintain a reliable Podcast RSS feed that I can pump into Overcast (my podcast player of choice — check it out!).

For years, my work around has been to have the video playing on my iPhone while I do other things on my iPad. This has always required the screen to remain on, since YouTube inexplicably removed background audio support from YouTube years ago. This process has always been far less than ideal. In fact, it negatively impacts my life because it significantly hampers my use of iPhone — both because I can’t do anything else on it while the video is playing, and because having the screen playing a video for hours zaps the battery like nobody’s business. I recently did some research to try to solve this problem and I have been using a third-party YouTube app called ProTube for a few months now. It’s not a great app, but it gets the job done and it fits my needs much more than Google’s official app. With news of this new third-party-app policy, it appears Google is expecting me to shell out a monthly fee to simply use it’s app how I use any other media app on iOS.