Picture-in-picture viewing will be added to the YouTube app for iOS and iPadOS. This will happen two years after the feature was made available to third-party developers on iPhones and seven years after it was added to iPads.
Google says that the picture-in-picture feature will be added slowly, but it didn’t say when. However, it was made clear that the feature would be available in different places and to different Premium subscribers.
Anyone with a YouTube Premium subscription and any video will be able to use picture-in-picture around the world. People in the US who don’t have YouTube Premium will also be able to use picture-in-picture, but only for content that Google says isn’t music.
This restriction is likely to stop people from just using a free YouTube account to play music in the background on their devices instead of subscribing to the company’s music services. Even though picture-in-picture is new, background audio (including music) for videos that are currently playing has been a key part of YouTube Premium for a long time.
Picture-in-picture was first added to iPhones with iOS 14, which came out in 2020. On the iPad, it was added with iOS 9, which came out in 2015. Since it was first introduced on the iPhone, the feature has made its way into the most well-supported video apps on the platform. YouTube is the only one that doesn’t have it.
Google said last summer that it would start testing the feature with YouTube Premium members who opted in. The test period ended in April. Since then, the company hadn’t said anything about it. YouTube picture-in-picture has been available to Android users for years.
For what it’s worth, Google’s announcement of this new rollout in a community support post acknowledged the slow pace, saying.
