For a year now, YouTube Premium subscribers on iOS and iPadOS have been able to watch YouTube content on their devices while continuing to do other things at the same time. The streaming video service indeed offered a Picture-in-Picture function, which made it possible to display a video within a floating window on the screen of an iPhone or iPad.
To take advantage of this feature, however, it was necessary to have activated it upstream from the page devoted to the experimental functions of the platform. But since a few days, some YouTube users are reporting that the feature is no longer available. And for good reason, the test of Picture in Picture mode on iOS officially ended on April 8th. The disappearance of the Picture-in-Picture, however, should not last.
Asked on Twitter about this disappearance by a disgruntled user, the support team replied that the Picture-in-Picture is being rolled out in its stable version and will be available on all iOS devices. 15 and above over the next few days.
However, YouTube does not indicate whether its deployment will once again only concern Premium subscribers. Because if the display of content in Picture-in-Picture is natively managed by iOS since version 14, YouTube did not seem inclined so far to make all its users benefit from this feature.
When iOS 14 was released in 2020, everyone, without exception, had the ability to view YouTube videos in Picture-in-Picture on the iPhone and iPad, especially from the mobile web version of the service. But Google, which did not see this option very favorably, had proceeded to block it for free users of YouTube… And had preferred to reserve it only for Premium subscribers and pushing others to resort to hacks to enjoy it without untie purse.
Source : The Verge