Ten years of Minimizer
One app, one developer, and more than a million people who just wanted YouTube to work their way.
How it started
In 2016, a junior developer in Greece was looking for an app idea. He started asking people what they wished their phones could do but couldn’t yet.
His sister had an answer: “I want to be able to play a video on YouTube and do other things, like we can do on PC!”
That was the idea. At the time, YouTube stopped playing as soon as you left the app or locked your phone. So he built something that could keep the video playing in a floating window while you did something else.
It was small, it was rough, and it did exactly what she had asked for. He put it on Google Play expecting nothing.
More than a million people downloaded it.
What it became
Over the years, Minimizer grew into what its users asked for. A floating window you could move and resize. Music mode, for treating YouTube like a music app. Ghost mode, for keeping a video on screen while you use something else. Downloads. A sleep timer. Playlists, search, comments, the things people kept writing in about.
It was never a company. It has always been one person reading every support email, writing every line of code, and deciding what to build next based on what people actually said.
Version 10
By 2025, the original foundations had gone as far as they could. Minimizer had been built on top of YouTube’s mobile site for nine years, and every new feature was a little harder to add than the last.
So it was rebuilt. Not updated but rebuilt from nothing, over a year, with a native interface and a proper architecture underneath. Version 10 is that app, released on the tenth anniversary of the first one.
Everything that made Minimizer worth using is still here. It is simply faster, cleaner, and finally built on something that can carry the next ten years.
What Minimizer will never do
Every user gets the complete app. There is no premium version, no locked feature, no “upgrade to continue”. There never has been and there never will be.
Minimizer is free and supported by ads. There is an optional subscription for people who want to support its development, and as a thank-you it removes the ads. That is the entire difference. Someone who pays nothing gets exactly the same app as someone who pays.
The details
Minimizer for YouTube is developed and published by Vlasis Alexopoulos, Greece.
It is an independent app, not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by YouTube or Google. “YouTube” is a trademark of Google LLC.
Get in touch
Support requests, bug reports, feature ideas, or just to say hello, every message is read by the person who built the app.
From inside the app: Profile → Request support.
By email:
[email protected]