Samsung’s Battery Guardian brings free YouTube background playback to One UI 6

Summary

• Samsung’s Good Guardians module, available through the Galaxy Store, offers useful features like monitoring heat and battery stats, as well as extending battery
  
  life
  
  .
• A new feature in the Battery Guardian module for One UI 6 devices is Screen Curtain, which overlays an always-on display screen while keeping the active app running.
• Screen Curtain can be used creatively, such as allowing YouTube
  
  videos
  
  to continue playing in the background without needing a YouTube Premium subscription.

Samsung loves to release suites of apps that let more advanced users tinker with their phones. Good Lock is the one most people are familiar with, but Good Guardians is worth looking at, too. These modules help you monitor heat and thermal performance (needed features on Exynos phones), monitor battery stats, and extend your battery life. A recent update to one of these modules has added a useful new feature that YouTube users

will

especially enjoy.

Battery Guardian is all about extending your battery life. It can dim your screen if you haven’t touched it recently on a per-app basis, lock certain apps to 60Hz, limit certain apps to 4G instead of 5G, and more. If you’re in the One UI 6 beta, there’s a brand-new

feature

called Screen Curtain (via

Go Android

). When enabled, it adds a shortcut to your quick settings or can be assigned to the accessibility shortcut. When you trigger Screen Curtain, the phone will go to a new always-on display screen, but the app you were in will stay active, thinking the screen is switched on.

To access the feature, you’ll need to install

Good Guardians from the Galaxy Store

and then download the Battery Guardian module. Inside that module, the new Screen Curtain feature can be enabled via a quick setting tile or with the power button + volume up key combination. The “curtain” looks like a revised always-on display that shows the

time

, the app currently open, and your battery level. To leave, press the power key or double tap the screen.

This will be especially useful if you’re using an app that needs to stay open and on-screen to perform a task, like a file upload or running a benchmark. That’s the use case it’s intended for, but while testing it out, I tried to think of some

creative

ways this could be more useful, and I believe I’ve found something a lot of you will love.

One of the most popular YouTube Premium features is background playback, and this lets you use that without Premium. Open the video you want to watch and activate Screen Curtain. You’ll go to the new always-on screen, and your video will continue to play. This isn’t as good as Premium, as you don’t get lock screen controls or picture-in-picture, but if all you want is to be able to put your phone in your pocket and listen to a YouTube video, you can.

You can download Good Guardians and Battery Guardian from the Galaxy Store on your Samsung Galaxy device. Remember that you need the Android 14-based One UI 6 beta to use it. As One UI 6 gets closer to going stable, expect to see more updates to Good Guardians and Good Lock modules that add new features or make existing ones compatible with the new version of Android.