This weekend, YouTube removed the long-running experiment that allowed iPhone and iPad users to keep watching videos in picture-in-picture mode. Now, YouTube has confirmed that its iOS app is in the process of rolling out picture-in-picture support to everyone on iOS 15 and up.
In a tweet late last night from @TeamYouTube, the company officially confirmed that picture-in-picture support is now rolling out on iOS devices through the official YouTube app. As per usual with new features from YouTube and Google alike, the rollout will take a “matter of days,” but YouTube says it will be available on all devices running iOS 15 and up.
YouTube further confirmed to The Verge that this Twitter mention of a “matter of days” is accurate, and that the feature is indeed finally being made widely available.
Picture-in-picture (PiP) support has been a part of iOS for quite some time, but YouTube’s official app never offered wide support for the feature, leaving many iPhone and iPad users to resort to viewing videos through their web browser.
YouTube for Android, meanwhile, has had support for PiP since the release of Android 8.0 Oreo in 2017. iOS didn’t add PiP support until the release of iOS 14 which launched in 2020.
For over a year now, YouTube has offered a PiP “experiment” to Premium subscribers to allow them to enable support for PiP on iOS, but the experiment, which officially ended over the weekend, was not enabled by default.
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