🍿 Prevent Youtube on iOS from exiting full screen on playlists

Snacks (🍿) are my collection of recipes for solving problems. Often recorded (and cleaned up) from actual discussions where I'm involved in helping others with technical problems. Not all solutions are mine but I started collecting them in one place because you never know when you need one.

If you're watching a Youtube playlist on the iOS app and have the video on full screen, it will exit out of full screen when switching to the next video, which is very annoying, especially if watching at night in bed as the white Youtube UI is very bright.

The first solution I came up with was to hit the gear/settings button on the top right and choose Lock screen which solves the problem but introduces another problem as now it's cumbersome to interact with the player (skip, rewind, go to next video etc).

Today I came across the solution in a r/youtube reddit thread by u/rtw314:

For anyone else who stumbles here, the fix is to close the playlist screen on the right when you're not full screen. For some reason this will prevent it from closing full screen but will still keep playing the playlist.

It works and is by far the better solution than locking the player.