Having conquered the video-streaming market with a torrent of uber-popular shows like Tiger King, Stranger Things, Better Call Saul, and more, Netflix is now seemingly all set to add a so-called ‘Audio Mode’ for background listening. That’s according to XDA, which claims that an APK teardown of the latest version of the Netflix Android app suggests that the company is working on background audio playback.
The new feature, hints of which can be found in the Netflix app version 7.79.1, suggests that users might soon be able to just listen to their favorite shows rather than streaming full videos. According to the report, the aforementioned build of the app contains a number of strings that reveals the upcoming feature. Some of the tell-tale strings are as follows:
<string name="audio_mode_intro_tooltip_message">Save your data by turning off the video and listening to your favorite shows.</string>
<string name="audio_mode_tooltip_title">New</string>
<string name="audio_mode_video_off_tooltip_message">The video is off, but you can continue listening to your show while you are busy doing other things.</string>If the feature does eventually roll out, it will be helpful for music concerts and stand-up comedy skits, where you can save a lot of mobile data by just streaming the audio while skipping on the video entirely. That said, it is still a work in progress, so it is unclear if it will ever make it to a stable build. However, it will be a fairly helpful feature for folks with low data caps, so it will be interesting to see when Netflix will finally start rolling it out to all users.
