YouTube ends picture-in-picture experimentation on iPhone without launch

Who knows how long we’ll all have to wait for picture-in-picture support for the YouTube app.

As 9to5Google reports, YouTube has officially ended its testing for picture-in-picture support on iPhone and iPad. It was available to YouTube Premium subscribers as an experimental feature for about a year, but as of this weekend, it’s not available to any users of the app who want to enable it.

While Google is notifying users that “the feature you’re trying has been discontinued,” it’s apparently still in the works for YouTube Premium subscribers who don’t have access to it from being turned off by Google. The facility was already operational.

That said, YouTube PiP still works for iPhone and iPad users who previously had the test enabled. It didn’t disappear on an iPad we actively use PiP enabled it while installing the YouTube app on a new iPhone and signing in to a premium account.

However, premium users who have never used it do not have PiP today. YouTube has yet to roll out the capability widely, 10 months later.

I personally enabled the experimental picture-in-picture feature as a YouTube Premium subscriber months ago and can confirm that the feature still works as reported above.

Google has already said that it plans to formally roll out picture-in-picture support as a perk to YouTube Premium subscribers. It also plans to make the feature available to all YouTube users, premium or not, in the United States. However, the company is yet to reveal when exactly the roll-out will happen.

YouTube has some catching up to do. Picture-in-picture has quickly become an expected feature for video apps on the iPhone and iPad since Apple debuted it a few years ago with iOS 14. Even the YouTube TV app added support for the feature in late March.