You know those times when you realise an annoying problem has such a simple solution that you want to slap yourself for not thinking of it earlier?
So blindingly obvious, in fact, that it seemed silly to even mention it to anyone else – until YouTube made me realize that it’s not just me …
I very often start listening to a podcast through headphones, or AirPlaying to speakers, while I’m at home. Or it might be a YouTube video where I’m happy to just listen, rather than watch.
My iPhone is close by. That might be on my desk, a kitchen countertop, or a table. All good. Then I move elsewhere in the flat – and in picking up my iPhone, I clumsily manage to touch the screen in a way that causes the playhead to jump back to the beginning, or to a random point. It can then take an annoyingly long time to re-find the correct point.
Initially, I thought this was just me. But a YouTube experimental feature introduced yesterday suggested that I’m not actually the only person in the world clumsy enough to do this on a regular basis.
Very little is as frustrating as settling in to watch a video on YouTube only for a couple of misplaced taps to skip, pause, or close the video entirely. To combat this, YouTube has rolled out another experimental feature, which is available for YouTube Premium subscribers.
When watching a YouTube video, users will see a “Lock screen” option. Tapping it locks out any taps or touches from then on out. The only way to unlock the screen is to hit “Tap to unlock.”
Reference to a tapping function initially reminded me of Apple’s Back Tap accessibility feature, introduced back in 2020.
The new iPhone feature lets you customize double and triple taps on the back of your iPhone to use for Shortcuts automations, Accessibility features, and iOS system actions.
So one solution would simply be to configure a double-tap to return to the Lock Screen. At which point I realized I don’t even need to do that: It turns out that iPhones have a power switch! If I just hit that instead, both audio and video players will continue playing audio when the phone locks.
Although there’s a Now Playing widget on my Lock Screen, the chances of accidentally hitting the Previous or Next buttons on that are next to zero, as it takes one tap to wake up the controls, and a second tap to interact.
So yep, blindingly obvious – but maybe I’m not the only one not to have thought of it sooner!
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