Picture in Picture is a handy feature even for YouTube: here’s who will be able to use it soon with Apple iOS devices and who, instead, will have to wait.
Giuseppe Croce Journalist
Peppe Croce, journalist since 2008, deals with electronic devices and new technologies applied to the automotive world. He joined Libero Tecnologia in 2018.
The YouTube app for iOS introduces a change that will be particularly welcome to many users. It increases the number of devices that take advantage of PiP technology, allowing you to continue viewing videos hosted on the platform while you continue using it or other apps. Who will be able to use the feature?
Although picture-in-picture, or what we might call picture-in-picture in Italian, isn’t completely new on iOS, the feature’s presence on the operating system has been rather up and down over time. The introduction of the active thumbnail, indeed, already dates back to iOS 9 on iPad and iOS 14 for iPhone. Yet since then, the ability to play while performing other actions has appeared and disappeared from update to update. Now, however, the release could be final even if still not able to cover the entire slice of the population that uses the devices of the bitten apple daily.
YouTube PiP for iOS, who can use it
To anticipate the news to The Verge has provided a spokesman for YouTube. The function, according to the declarations provided, is becoming definitive but, at least in the first instance, only for a segment of the public. It will be exclusively American users, in fact, to enjoy the picture-in-picture on a permanent basis.
All this will happen using the native application for iOS, as it already happens for users of devices with Android operating system. Therefore, once the playback of a clip through the app is started, the smartphone owner will have the opportunity to continue with the navigation, without suffering the age-old block that normally occurs on these occasions.
YouTube PiP, when it arrives on iOS
Despite not having been provided so far a certain date for the fixed implementation of the feature, the company has indicated that this will involve all users, regardless of whether or not they subscribe to a YouTube Premium subscription. For now, however, only subscribers of the latter type of account will be the first to be able to take advantage of this convenient addition, as the platform has already started releasing the necessary changes for them.
Subsequently, other users of the Apple-born application will be involved, i.e. those who use the app and view content for free. At the moment, no further information has been released for the rest of the world, but this does not exclude that in the future this element will be extended to the remaining nations of the globe.