Netflix for Android now lets you start watching before its finished downloading

At some point, we’ve all been there before. You’re trying to download something from Netflix to watch later, but you don’t want to wait until the episode or movie is finished downloading. Until now, you were pretty much out of luck and had to wait until the movie was finished downloading in its entirety before firing it up. That’s no longer the case, as Netflix has announced that you can start watching things before they are finished.

The new “partial downloading” feature is available on Android phones and tablets starting today, and will be coming to iOS “in the coming months”. How it works is that you find what you want to download, start the process, and when enough of the episode has finished downloading, a prompt appears letting you know that you can start. Just tap on the show or movie, hit Play, then sit back and enjoy. Meanwhile, whatever you’re watching will continue to download in the background.

All you need to do is make sure that you head over to the Play Store and download the latest update. The feature is available in version 7.64 or higher, so just make sure to check the version number and you can enjoy this new Netflix feature.