You may like to watch YouTube videos as you fall asleep, but if you do you’ve certainly noticed a huge glaring omission in the service’s mobile apps. There is absolutely no way to make YouTube stop playing after a set time – there’s no sleep timer.
That’s set to change soon. According to a teardown of the most recent version of the YouTube app for Android, a sleep timer is now finally in development, as evidenced by the strings in the screenshot below.
As you’d expect, this will allow playback to stop after a specified period of time. If you haven’t actually managed to fall asleep before the timer ran out, you’ll get the option to reset the timer or just be done with it and continue watching without any additional timer. You will be able to set a specific number of hours and minutes for the timer, and the remaining time will be displayed as a notification.
YouTube Music already offers a sleep timer, as do many other streaming and podcast apps, but of course none of those gets as much use as YouTube so this will be a very nice addition when it does finally land.
The lack of a sleep timer is less of a problem on iOS, where you can set a system-wide timer that will end any playback when it reaches zero, but there isn’t a similar option in Android.
