On the face of it, playing YouTube videos in the background on your iPad or iPhone while doing something else should just work. Alas, it doesn’t unless you have Chuck Zou’s McTube for YouTube (free), a near feature-complete YouTube client for iOS.

With McTube, you can log into your YouTube account and do, as far as I tell, almost anything you can do using the desktop version of Safari. The notable exception is upload videos.

McTube is “free,” which is to say that it’s advertising supported and the banners aren’t particularly obnoxious.

That said, although McTube allows you to play YouTube videos in the background on your iPhone or iPad, you might need to allow the video play for a few moments before jumping to another app — switching was sometimes a little janky on my iPad 3 running iOS 6.1.3, though a modicum of patience fixed that.

For what it’s worth, McTube YouTube background playback can be stopped and started by my ZaggMate iPad keyboard’s play button.

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