Xiaomi just killed an awesome feature on its smartphones

One of the perks of YouTube Premium is the ability to play videos in the background. This is useful because there are some videos where you don’t really need to watch it to know what’s going on, like the news, a cooking video, a podcast, and so on. Now it looks like Xiaomi is killing off that YouTube feature on its phones.

In case you’re unfamiliar, one of the features of Xiaomi’s smartphones actually allowed users to access background video playback on YouTube without a YouTube Premium subscription. This came in the form of an option called “Play video sound with screen off”, which when enabled allowed background playback.

Xiaomi announced that they would be killing off the feature in the Mi Fans Home Telegram channel. According to the company, they said that they will be disabling the feature “due to compliance requirements”, which presumably had something to do with YouTube. These changes will go into effect via an OTA software update, so if you receive the update and the feature stops working, you know why.

Google has been actively cracking down on apps and tools that allow give this feature away for free. It is understandable. After all, why pay for YouTube Premium when you can get it for free, right?