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I think the difference is that offline playback and background playback on iOS/Android can be unlocked through YouTube Premium so those apps directly interfere with YouTube's bottom line. YouTube-dl I don't really see as directly competing with that because it's not trivial to download a YouTube video from it to your phone.



You can use Firefox mobile and the "Video Background Play Fix" addon to disable the browser APIs that allow the background play blocking antifeature.

Alternatively, the NewPipe app available on F-Droid can be used to both play videos in the background and download them.




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