How to Stop Random Skips and Pauses of Netflix on Android
It’s always annoying when you’re watching a movie on your phone and accidentally stop or skip it when you adjust your grip and touch the wrong part of the screen. Netflix seems to have heard our collective disgruntled groan and added a useful lock screen feature to its Android app that will make those unintentional time jumps a thing of the past. The feature has been rolled out to most Android devices over the past few days, but Netflix hasn’t said much about it, so you probably didn’t even notice it was there.
How to use Netflix’s new lock screen feature on Android
The Netflix lock button can be found while streaming content in the app, located right below the timeline slider. Clicking on it disables the playback UI and app navigation buttons and replaces the entire interface with a single “lock” button. Here’s an example of what it looks like in a GIF from 9to5Google :
I guess it would technically make this function more of a “hide” function than a real “lock”, but the result is much the same: no more digging back and forth trying to find its place. Here’s how to use the screen lock feature:
- Open Netflix, start a movie or episode, and enter full screen mode.
- Tap the screen to display on-screen controls.
- Tap Screen Lock.
- You should see a padlock pop-up with the message “Screen is locked. Click to unblock. ” After a few seconds, it will disappear, and now you can watch your stream without fear of accidentally pausing it or closing the window.
- Tap the screen, then tap the lock icon to unlock the controls if you really need to pause, skip forward, adjust sound, or close an app.