YouCast

Listen to anything on YouTube as audio, with your phone locked and in your pocket

My younger sister listened to podcasts on YouTube every day, and every day the audio stopped the second her phone went into her pocket. Nobody should have to walk home with their phone face up and the screen burning just to hear the end of an episode.

What we kept seeing

The workarounds were the giveaway. Phones left face up and unlocked on a passenger seat so the sound would keep coming. Screens burning through a battery on a walk for audio nobody was looking at. Playback dying every time a phone went into a pocket, and the same thumb reaching back in to start it again. Nobody was asking for a feature. People had already decided YouTube was where their podcasts lived, and were quietly paying for that decision in battery, in attention, and in ad breaks sat through for the second time. The gap was not in what they wanted. It was in what the app was willing to do once the screen went dark.

The bet we made

The obvious move was to build a full podcast client on top of it — feeds, subscriptions, recommendations, a discovery layer. We cut all of it.

YouCast is not competing with YouTube or with podcast platforms, and every feature idea after that got measured against one question: does it get the audio into your ears faster with the phone in your pocket? Almost nothing passed. That is why it shipped in two months and stayed clean enough to hand to the public.

What shipped

A published mobile app with background playback, offline audio downloads, in-app search, custom playlists and no ads. No account to create, no subscription, and the full repository is public and forkable.