YouTube ends experiment for quickly enabling PiP on iOS, still works for existing users

Abner Li | Apr 9 2022 - 12:30 pm PT

YouTube started officially rolling out Picture-in-Picture to the iOS app last June and it’s been a very slow process. Premium subscribers were given a workaround, but YouTube’s PiP test for iPhone and iPad has now ended.

The “Picture-in-Picture on iOS” experiment (from August) has disappeared from youtube.com/new after hitting its early April end date. Google notified people with a “The feature you’re trying has been turned off” banner on the desktop site and mobile apps.

That said, the YouTube PiP still works for iPhone and iPad users that previously had the test enabled. It did not disappear on one iPad we actively use PiP on, while installing the YouTube app on a new iPhone and signing into a Premium account enabled it.

Premium users, however, that never tried the experiment do not have PiP today. YouTube has yet to widely roll out the capability 10 months later.

A full launch is hopefully coming soon as YouTube TV has just widely rolled out PiP for its iOS app. It was announced at the end of March and is fully available as of this week. It’s arguably much more needed for the premium cord-cutting product.

Picture-in-Picture is a perk (i.e. background play) for paying YouTube Premium users around the world. In the US, PiP will be made available for free, ad-supported users. Music content is excluded as a likely upsell to YouTube’s dedicated streaming service.