The future of picture-in-picture support for YouTube on the iPhone is unclear.
As spotted by MacRumors, YouTube has extended support for the experimental feature until February 14. YouTube Premium subscribers can still enjoy using picture-in-picture with the YouTube app on the iPhone and iPad until that date.
YouTube initially launched picture-in-picture as an experimental feature for iOS back in August of 2021. Up until now, the feature has only been available to YouTube Premium subscribers. Free users have not had access to the feature yet despite a ton of other apps already supporting picture-in-picture formally like Apple TV, Hulu, Twitch, and more.
The company promised in July of 2021 that, while the feature would be only available to Premium subscribers as an experimental feature first, it would eventually come to all users.
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.
In a statement today, Google says that it still does plan to launch picture-in-picture support for all users but did not commit to a launch date.
We’re still planning to launch PiP for all users without a YouTube Premium subscription in the US. We have no other updates to share at this time. In the meantime, we’ve also extended our experiment of PiP on youtube.com/new for our Premium users on iOS as we continue to test and improve the experience before launch.
Apple originally announced support for picture-in-picture on the iPhone and iPad when it revealed iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 back at WWDC in 2020.
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