One of the biggest complaints about the YouTube app is when you minimize the app, the video you are watching will not play in the background. So if you’re jamming to your favorite song and you get a text, it interrupts your flow. Thanks to DJiT, there is an app for that. I love that saying. It’s in early beta so please be patient.
Developer: DJiT Best free music and audio apps for Android
Cost: Free with in-app purchase for ads removed
Review
Stream is a free YouTube player for Android that allows you to continue to play music from the app while doing other things on your phone such as check email, send texts, and update Twitter. Stream does this by creating a floating pop-up of the video that can be moved anywhere on the screen.
The pop-up player’s size can be changed to four different sizes with the largest taking up almost half of your screen. From the video screen, you can add the video to favorites, clear your queue, and share the video. You can also put songs on repeat and shuffle your playlist. When you are done simply tap and drag the video to the X to close the song.
Inside the app, you have three categories to choose from: Top, Discover and Playlist. Starting in the Top section, you’ll find a list of the most popular music videos on YouTube. It learns your favorite songs and adjusts its recommendations to that.
To add a song to your favorites, simply click the heart. Tapping the three dots gives you a ton more options to choose from. You can start a radio station from that song, which is a playlist of songs from that artist. Play now, add to current queue or playlist, and share round out the options from that menu.
Stream’s Discover tab has a plethora of different radio stations to choose from. First, you have a couple of mood style options such as Party and Workout as well as genres. It also gives you the ability to email them a request for a station.
Finally, we come to the Playlist. This is where all your favorites and created playlist are stored. Here, you can rearrange the order of the songs in each playlist by clicking and dragging or shuffle them. Of course, you can just play them in the order you favored them. You are also given the option to import your playlist from YouTube, which is a handy feature.
I have talked to the developers about giving Stream the ability to create a playlist within the playlist tab. As it stands, you can only create a playlist from the menu in each song, which can be a little annoying. They are looking into this.
Beta
Please keep in mind this is early beta version and any bugs should be resolved by the time it hits its final release. They also would like to have more people involved in the beta. After all, they can’t improve without input from the consumer. So download it and help out the developers create a product that you can love. I can attest to the fact that they do respond to their users.
Summary
Stream provides something users want. To not be trapped in an app that plays music. It’s likely that YouTube will add this feature at some point, but in the meantime, we need apps like this. It only makes sense. So head over and download the beta and enjoy.
Download Stream from the Play Store