Android 11 DP4: Picture-in-picture gets resizing and other UI changes

Kyle Bradshaw | May 6 2020 - 2:49 pm PT

The fourth Android 11 Developer Preview released today, bringing a small swath of changes and upgrades. Included in these, you’ll find that Android 11 is making picture-in-picture resizable and bringing some minor changes to its UI.

As our phones get bigger and more capable of doing multiple tasks simultaneously, picture-in-picture in video apps, and especially YouTube, has become more important. To that end, Android 11 is reworking the picture-in-picture experience to be more useful.

The most important change is that you can now resize the picture-in-picture window to be larger or smaller. To resize, first open a video into picture-in-picture mode, then tap and drag from one of the window’s bottom corners.

This resizing handle is a bit trickier to find in practice than it should be, though we’ll forgive this for now, as we’re not even in the Beta stage of Android 11 yet. Once you’ve managed to grab a hold of the corner, slide your finger up to scale down or slide down to make the window bigger.

Even in an early state, it’s easy to see how this could come in handy when doing something like a YouTube tutorial where you may want to get a bigger look at the video without going back to fullscreen. Or conversely, music-only videos can take up less real estate on your screen.

Additionally, Android 11 changes up the UI for picture-in-picture a bit. Instead of the usual black gradient and “Drag down to dismiss,” Android 11’s picture-in-picture offers a standard “X” bubble.