Just get the Vinegar app. I ditched the YT app on all my devices and now use the mobile site. Vinegar forces it to use the HTML player which gets you PiP and no ads. It works on Macs and IOS devices.
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YouTube Still Testing Picture-in-Picture on iOS With Premium Subscribers [Updated]
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Sounds great, but I cant seem to find a iOS version, only for Mac OS -> Safari.
Edit: my bad, i found it.
I dont use the YouTube app on iOS, because of ads. I watch through Safari, which blocks ads with a adblocker. And through there, I acutally managed to get YouTube to play in the background, it's just audio no video. The way it works (but not always):
1. While watching a video, swipe up to go to the homescreen. YouTube will stop playing.
2. Lock your iPhone.
3. Tap the screen, the onscreen player should display the video. Tap to play it.
4. Unlock iPhone to go to the homescreen. The audio of the video should still be playing (yay).
5. You can do everything while the audio is in the background. But if you reopen Safari, it'll go to YouTube and you'll need to repeat the proces.
6. BUT: if you also need Safari: while the audio is playing on the homescreen, press and hold on Safari -> open a new tab. This will 'hide' the active YouTube tab and its audio wil continue to play while you browse.
All in all, this method is nice if you're listening to a podcast or something and dont need to watch. It even works after you lock your iPhone. I do think this is a bug in iOS 15.2, because the (Music) player also sometimes shows up, even though the Music app isn't open. That's why the video player from YouTube appears on the homescreen (I think), but not always as I said. It's a bit random.
Though I'd share, somebody might find it useful.
They have been playing this game for too long, give and take away. PiP has worked on Android for years with this feature and works fine on iOS now. I personally will be cancelling my Premium membership if they take this away again and reported it in my feedback to them as well (not like it will matter).
I also have PiP working on my iPhone 13 Pro. I do not currently have YouTube Premium, but did have a free trial at one point. Has been working consistently for at least the last few days.
Not sure if it started after I got my iPhone 13 last month, but I have this feature (though a smaller window than the image in the article. Screenshot attached) and I don’t have premium. I just assumed everyone had it so I didn’t make a mental note of when it started.
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I’m literally using it in my iPad Pro right now and have been since the feature rolled out to my device within days of testing beginning.
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It doesn’t work for all. I have no setting on both iPad Pros, new fresh iPad and an older one. Reinstalling the app doesn’t help. It’s ridiculous to gatekeeper this feature to premium members when they can’t even enable it for all premium members.
In Germany, this feature is only available for premium subscribers. But the quality of the videos is lacking due to the pandemic, YouTube recommends always the same videos I‘ve already seen and the app is getting worse and worse. Now, I have to disable subtitles on my AppleTV every freaking time!!! And on all other devices as well, even tough the default is disabled.
you could stop your subscription as well. I use Youtube and get adfree, background play and PiP for free. You get scammed.
What's weird is I used to have this on my iPhone X before it died, and I've never had YouTube Premium.
Indeed. Google, being a global corporation and gathering as much info as they can from every corner of the world, could well look after “their own” and enable it for everybody using their tools.
Feature should be free. And it should be free everywhere and not just in the US.
yea, but heated seats are a premium feature though — unlike picture-in-picture.
You can still do it for free from safari on iOS. It’s only the native app that charges for it. Why? Who know. Google gonna google.
Are we going to just ignore the fact that this feature is not available on the iPad with a $60+ month YouTube TV subscription?
Don‘t think they can challenge this. PiP might be a „core iOS feature“ but YouTube providing the functionality is not free for them, it costs bandwidth.
There was a case a few years ago where a famous app (I think it was Apollo Reddit?) got into trouble for gatekeeping notifications behind in-app purchases. That was later settled when they argued that push notifications cost them money (cause they were generated by their servers polling API endpoints). I think that started a turnaround where more and more apps could lock functionality if they couldn‘t provide them for free.
So yes, PiP could technically be locked to premium subscriptions because they can argue that it costs them bandwidth to stream the video to users.
Or you could buy Vinegar so that YouTube videos use the standard plugin so you get all of the features including PiP.