How to Get a YouTube Transcript on iPhone and Android

Getting a transcript on a phone is genuinely harder than on desktop, and not for the reason people assume. The transcript is there in the mobile app. You just cannot get the text out of it.

The mobile app: where the transcript hides

On both iPhone and Android:

1. Open the video in the YouTube app.
2. Tap the video title to expand the description panel.
3. Scroll down to the Transcript section.
4. Tap Show transcript.

The timestamped transcript slides up. Tapping a line jumps the video to that moment, which is the feature's actual purpose.

The catch: this view does not support normal text selection. You cannot long-press and drag to select a range, and there is no copy or share control. It is built for navigation, not for extraction. If your goal is to read along or find a moment, this is fine and you are done. If your goal is to get the words into a note, this route is a dead end.

Some Android builds allow a long press that copies a single line. That is one caption cue of a few words, not the transcript.

Option 1: request the desktop site in your mobile browser

The desktop transcript panel does allow selection, and you can reach it from a phone browser.

iPhone (Safari):

1. Open the video at youtube.com in Safari, not the app.
2. Tap AA in the address bar.
3. Choose Request Desktop Website.
4. Find ...more under the title, then Show transcript.

Android (Chrome):

1. Open the video at youtube.com in Chrome.
2. Tap ⋮ in the top right.
3. Tick Desktop site.
4. Find ...more under the title, then Show transcript.

You now have the desktop panel, and you can long-press to select text.

In practice this is fiddly. The desktop layout on a phone screen is cramped, the panel is narrow, and selecting a long transcript by dragging on a touch screen is unpleasant. It also inherits the desktop problem where long transcripts only render near your scroll position, so a fast scroll loses the middle. It works for a short video. It is not a realistic way to capture a two-hour podcast.

Option 2: use a transcript tool in the browser

The path that actually works on a phone is to not fight the app at all.

1. In the YouTube app, tap Share, then Copy link.
2. Open Brevyd's transcript tool in your mobile browser.
3. Paste the link.

You get the full transcript, punctuated and paragraphed, with a copy button that puts the whole thing on your clipboard in one tap. No desktop mode, no dragging a selection across three hours of text, and it works on videos where the app shows no transcript section at all.

From there you can also get plain text or a summary rather than the full transcript, which on a phone is often what you actually wanted.

Option 3: share directly from the app

You can skip the copy-paste step. In the YouTube app, tap Share, and if you have Brevyd open in a browser tab you can paste straight in. On iOS, adding the tool to your home screen makes it behave like an app and removes a step.

Why the mobile app will not let you copy

This comes up often enough to be worth stating plainly: it is not a bug or a missing setting, and no amount of looking through the app's options will reveal a copy control. YouTube built the mobile transcript as a seek-and-scan interface. Text selection was never part of it, on either platform.

Frequently asked questions

Is there a Transcript option missing from my app? If the section does not appear at all, the video has no caption track, not a mobile limitation. See how to get a transcript when captions are disabled.

Does this work on an iPad? Yes, and more comfortably. Safari on iPad handles the desktop site well, so option 1 is more viable there than on a phone.

Can I get timestamps on mobile? The app's transcript shows them. If you need them in text you can keep, use a tool that returns timestamped segments.

Do transcript apps from the App Store work? Some do. Most are wrappers around the same caption track, which means they fail on the same videos, and they tend to break when YouTube changes something.

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Copy the link, paste it here, and get the transcript.