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YouTube Premium Subscribers Can Now Use iOS Picture-in-Picture: Here's How
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I recently started to use Brave browser for YouTube. Best thing ever.. first of all no ads and with latest update they introduced playlist feature which automatically pops out whenever you start to watch any video. Works on YouTube.. background play is supported as well as PiP and you can also save any video to play off line.
It just proves that G is limiting software functionality in order to make money. Apparently billions of ads is not enough.
It just proves that G is limiting software functionality in order to make money. Apparently billions of ads is not enough.
Actually, not really. One could make the same argument about "Background Audio Playback," which is also a core iOS API — it's just most people have forgotten about that since it's been around since iOS 4.
YouTube not implementing PiP until now has nothing to do with Apple's policies and everything to do with Google's laziness and general disinterest in supporting iOS features. It also took five years for the Gmail app on the iPad to get split screen support, and that had nothing to do with money. Dark Mode in Gmail was a similarly frustrating rollout, with something that should have been switched on in a single app update taking almost a year before everybody had it.
As @georgeperez already pointed out, Apple's policies are there to prevent developers from charging solely to unlock a hardware or iOS feature, but plenty of developers limit certain features to higher paid tiers in their apps. In fact, it's no different than saying that developers can't charge for an app at all if it uses iPhone or iOS-level features.
I’m assuming it’s probably because of music, because you can watch music videos for free, but if you were able to do PIP and hide the video, it’s almost like having a free music streaming service.
That’s just my guess. I don’t know if that’s the real reason.
Now PIP also works on iPadOS if enabled as described in the article. This is a reintroduction of PIP that already has been available for iPadOS for a short time months ago. Please note that I use YouTube Premium. Absolutely ridiculous that it was necessary to use Safari to get PIP on the iPad.
Now on iPadOS the Settings window of the YouTube app has a new option for enabling PIP.
There is also a new option in the Settings of the youtube.com page: the color theme can be set independently from the System setting. Until a few days ago the youtube.com web site used the System color theme.
Now on iPadOS the Settings window of the YouTube app has a new option for enabling PIP.
There is also a new option in the Settings of the youtube.com page: the color theme can be set independently from the System setting. Until a few days ago the youtube.com web site used the System color theme.
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No, it's not because of that. Android phones have YouTube PIP feature for years.
I'm pretty sure that's it too. That's exactly why Background Audio Playback has been restricted to Premium users for the past several years.
In fact, when Apple first launched Background Audio in iOS 4, YouTube fully supported it, but yanked that support once it poured more money into its partnership with Vevo in 2013 and then launched YouTube Premium the following year. It was pretty obvious that was all about music streaming; since the whole Vevo deal was entirely ad-supported, they weren't about to give away free music to anybody who wasn't going to be "enjoying" the ads.
It looks like YouTube is going down the same road with PiP. A report earlier this year mentioned that it will eventually be available to free YouTube users in the U.S., but that music videos will be excluded.
True, but it's still only available to YouTube Premium users outside of the U.S., and those in the U.S. who aren't Premium subscribers can't use it for music content (see Google's support document).
That's almost identical to how it will eventually work on the iPhone and iPad, according to what YouTube told 9to5Google back in June. It sounds like they're just starting with YouTube Premium users first, since it's an "Experimental Feature" right now, and those are only open to Premium users in the first place.
People like me who took a "trip" to India in order to pay $2.60/monthly for a family plan of Youtube Premium
Yeah, this is BS, doesn’t work for me at all. Or is it because I’m on iOS 15? I have no idea what is wrong with YouTube that they can’t just implement this crap already like all other major companies did years ago. It’s not hard. Especially for premium users since we don’t have ads.
It is working for me on a 12 Pro iOS 14 and a Mini on iOS 15 Beta 7
I noticed when I enabled this last night that it took about an hour for the feature to kick in. Even the setting to enable/disable it in the app came up.
Yeah, it takes some time to refresh from the account settings, although you can force it to kick in immediately just by signing out of your account and back in — or even just switching to another account if you have more than one Google account configured on your device. That will refresh the account settings right away.
For watching YouTube I’m using chrome and I have this options for music and videos,
But Android is Google’s OS. They could have just made that a perk of using their OS.
I finally got it to work. A couple annoyances, not necessarily YouTube’s fault but it’s just the way system wide PIP works. When you pull down Notification Center, it pauses the video. Also when you lock the screen it pauses the video. Sometimes I want to continue to listen to the audio in the background when I do those things.