YouTube has confirmed that its picture-in-picture mode is now live for all YouTube users on supported Android devices in the United States.
YouTube has been testing picture-in-picture and other multitasking modes for the past few months and had made the former available only to its paying customers. Then in April, it began to roll out to other users as well. Now YouTube has confirmed that picture-in-picture mode is available to all users in the United States using a compatible device with Android version 8.0 (Oreo) or higher.
YouTube’s picture-in-picture mode – previously only available to YouTube Red customers – allows users to continue watching a video in a small window as they continue to browse on the app or elsewhere on their devices. The feature’s rollout was completed last week.
While iOS users can’t have their video float outside the YouTube app, over other apps, or on their home screen, they can “minimise” it while they continue to browse the YouTube app. The new feature is certainly an improvement to that, but there is no news as to when it might be released on iOS as well. Due to iOS’ particularities, it is likely that this will never happen.
Users who would like to enable Picture-in-Picture mode can simply toggle the setting in the app, but not all videos will work in PiP. If a creator disables it on their video, tapping on the home button to leave YouTube won’t leave the video playing as a floating widget.
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