{"id":229273,"date":"2026-03-30T13:41:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-30T17:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/30\/youtube-is-coming-to-android-auto-but-you-cant-watch-it\/"},"modified":"2026-03-30T13:50:10","modified_gmt":"2026-03-30T17:50:10","slug":"youtube-is-coming-to-android-auto-but-you-cant-watch-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/30\/youtube-is-coming-to-android-auto-but-you-cant-watch-it\/","title":{"rendered":"YouTube is coming to Android Auto &#8211; but you can&#8217;t watch it"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.zdnet.com\/article\/youtube-is-coming-to-android-auto-but-you-cant-watch-it\/\">YouTube is coming to Android Auto &#8211; but you can&#8217;t watch it<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.zdnet.com\/article\/youtube-is-coming-to-android-auto-but-you-cant-watch-it\/\">https:\/\/www.zdnet.com\/article\/youtube-is-coming-to-android-auto-but-you-cant-watch-it\/<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Publish Date: <a href=\"publish_date]\">2026-03-30 13:41:00<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Source Domain: <a href=\"www.zdnet.com\">www.zdnet.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p>    <span class=\"c-shortcodeImage_credit g-outer-spacing-top-xsmall u-block\">Thomas Trutschel \/ Contributor\/\tPhotothek via Getty Images<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Follow ZDNET: <span class=\"c-commerceLink\"><span>Add us as a preferred source<\/span><\/span> on Google.<\/p>\n<h3>ZDNET&#8217;s key takeaways<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>A YouTube app is coming to Android Auto.<\/li>\n<li>You can&#8217;t actually watch any videos, though.<\/li>\n<li>The app only lets you control the audio of a video that&#8217;s playing.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>A YouTube app is coming to your car, but don&#8217;t plan on watching any videos.<\/p>\n<p>Over the past several days, users have noticed a YouTube app appearing on Android Auto. But it doesn&#8217;t actually let you watch YouTube.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>What&#8217;s the point then?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Also: The fundamental reason why YouTube with ads isn&#8217;t worth it &#8211; even if it&#8217;s free<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The new YouTube app for Android Auto has no video playback and no browsing &#8212; it&#8217;s simply a media player for audio. You can play or pause content and skip forward to another video, and that&#8217;s all. That&#8217;s certainly limited, but if you frequently use YouTube for podcasts, long-form videos like lectures or classes, or music, this is a fairly useful feature. Android Auto already plays whatever audio is coming through your phone, so the ability to listen isn&#8217;t new. What&#8217;s new is easier controls with the buttons on your steering wheel or dashboard.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s another catch, though.\u00a0<\/p>\n<h2>A push for YouTube&#8217;s premium subscription?<\/h2>\n<p>Unless you just set your phone down and let the video play, running down your battery, you&#8217;ll need the video to play in the background to keep the audio going. And to do that, you&#8217;ll need to be a YouTube Premium subscriber.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><strong>Also: Your YouTube Premium subscription just got 3 major upgrades &#8211; plus AI experiments you can try<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>YouTube offers a premium subscription for $8 a month that includes ad-free viewing, the ability to download videos, and, most importantly here, lets you keep videos playing in the background while your phone is showing something else.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Given that Android Auto implements quite a few restrictions as to how you can interact with it while driving, it&#8217;s no surprise that you can&#8217;t watch videos. You have to wonder, though, if this is a push to&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.zdnet.com\/article\/youtube-is-coming-to-android-auto-but-you-cant-watch-it\/\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>YouTube is coming to Android Auto &#8211; but you can&#8217;t watch it https:\/\/www.zdnet.com\/article\/youtube-is-coming-to-android-auto-but-you-cant-watch-it\/ Publish Date:&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":229274,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.zdnet.com\/a\/img\/resize\/0dffd326b36ec6aea8e5aeb87f800d5df052178f\/2026\/03\/30\/c9a0af1f-c9ab-4e9d-9982-57637cba508c\/ytappgettyimages-2191665387.jpg?auto=webp&fit=crop&height=675&width=1200","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[70],"class_list":["post-229273","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-android","tag-google"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229273"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=229273"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229273\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":229275,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229273\/revisions\/229275"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/229274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=229273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=229273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=229273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}