Floating YouTube Android app puts videos in a small pop-up window

Samsung offers a tool on its Android phones and tablets that lets you keep a video playing in a small window while you’re running other apps. But you don’t need a Samsung device to do that.

Floating YouTube Popup Video is a free app which does exactly what the name suggests: It provides a pop-up window for watching YouTube videos from any screen on your phone or tablet.

Here’s how it works: You install the free app, open the YouTube app and find a video you want to watch. Then tap the share icon and choose to share the video with the Floating YouTube app.

This will bring the video up in a small window floating over your home screen. The video will keep playing even if you switch apps. You can resize or move the window.

While it’s kind of a nifty trick, it’s not really all that useful most of the time — because you can’t resize other Android apps. That means the video will almost always be on top of something else.

So you can watch a video while looking at the bottom of your email list, an instant message, or your phone dialer.

I suppose this could work in some instances — do you really need to see the whole screen to send a text message? But mostly it’s just a neat trick for adding a bit of Samsung multiview-like performance to most Android devices.

via CNET