GoKawiilJoe Maring / Android Authority
TL;DR YouTube on Android now starts replaying a paused video if you relaunch the app after several hours.
It’s unclear whether this is a bug or an intended feature.
Thousands of users have searched for a resolution on YouTube’s support pages, highlighting how widely disliked it is.
YouTube is easily one of the most widely used entertainment apps, and there’s only a handful of things you’d expect it to do nicely. Chiefly, what most users expect from YouTube is to play videos to your liking without force-feeding what it deems popular. Sometimes it plays videos without you explicitly asking for it. While you get the option to prevent videos on your feed or recommendations from auto-playing, the functionality now seems to be creeping up on users every time they launch the app on Android devices.
Large droves of YouTube users are complaining of an issue where paused videos start auto-playing the moment you launch the app on Android after a break. For most of those suffering from this issue, including me, videos start replaying from the beginning immediately after the app is relaunched after not being used for several hours. It usually does not occur if you launch YouTube just moments after closing it.
Hundreds of users chime in on several Reddit posts and their comments, sharing a common theme: the feature is tremendously annoying, and there’s no way to turn it off. As you could imagine, it can result in awkward public situations or jump scares when you’re least expecting them.
In a single YouTube Help thread, over 3,000 users confirm having issues with this behavior, and its scale suggests it might not even be a bug but a feature intended by Google.
For me, it’s absolutely nightmarish because I use YouTube to lull me to sleep by playing only moderately engaging podcasts, wind-down audio tracks like guided mediations, or binaural beats. I generally use a sleep timer, while keeping video autoplay turned off. And so, I’m almost always greeted with the same video starting from the beginning every time I open YouTube the next morning.
It’s even more galling to think I pay for YouTube Premium so I can use it in the background rather than having to keep the screen off, but instead get treated to broken and/or unwanted functionality. Notably, the issue also appears to vex non-paying users who simply close the app instead of closing the video first.
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