YouTube will soon be extending its Picture-in-Picture feature across all iPhones in the US, a change that many users will find to be a boost for multi-tasking.
Picture-in-Picture is a neat feature supported by YouTube that lets you keep playing a video in a pop-up window on your screen while you use other apps on your phone.
However, access to this feature is fairly limited: on Android devices, only YouTube Premium members worldwide or all Android users in the United States have been able to use it (as long as they have Android Oreo or later). As for iPhone users, until now the only opportunity to use it has come to YouTube Premium members who opted into a trial of the feature.
However this trial has now come to an end; only the iPhone users who had already signed up will still have access to picture-in-picture, while new users will be unable to sign up for the time being. Fortunately though, this cancellation is just preceding a wider rollout, because over the next few days it has been announced that iOS will finally catch up to Android’s offering, meaning that all YouTube Premium subscribers – and all YouTube users in the US – will be able to make use of Picture-in-Picture.
According to MacRumors, YouTube released the following statement:
Picture-in-Picture (PiP) allows users to watch YouTube videos in a small mini player while simultaneously browsing outside of the YouTube app on their mobile device. We’re starting to roll out PiP for YouTube Premium members on iOS and plan to launch PiP for all US iOS users as well.
For users outside the United States, we still don’t know when Picture-in-Picture mode could arrive on either Android or iOS for non-YouTube Premium subscribers. Any major software news concerning YouTube could be announced at the next developer summit hosted by its parent company, Google I/O 2022. However, we’re yet to hear any further news regarding a worldwide rollout of Picture-in-Picture for YouTube, so in other countries it may simply remain a Premium feature.
