YouTube Picture-in-Picture coming to non-Premium iPhone users… sooner or later?

By Scott Marlette Last updated Feb 2, 2022

The YouTube app for mobile has always insisted on not letting you play videos in the background. Obviously, as an ad-powered business, YouTube wants your screen to be on, with everything front and center, while interacting with its content. So, when background audio and Picture-in-Picture (floating window video) were introduced, they were obviously only available to YouTube Premium paying subscribers.

However, YouTube has started to budge a bit. Users in the States that are on Android Oreo and above have been able to enjoy YouTube PiP for a while now — regardless of whether they are Premium subscribers or not. Non-subscribers just continue to get ads in the little floating window, so it’s a win for everybody. iOS users should be getting that as well… uh, soon. Probably. Maybe. Should…

See, since August of 2021, YT Premium subscribers on iOS have been able to use PiP as an “experimental feature”. The testing period was supposed to be over on the 31st of January, 2022, which is now behind us. Turns out, YouTube decided to expand the testing period up to the 14th of February.

In a statement given to MacRumors, Google is adamant that it will bring PiP to everyone in the US some time after the testing period ends. But no official time window was given. With the testing period being expanded a bit further, it’s obvious that if you are a non-Premium user, you’ll have to… well, wait a bit more for the feature. What’s concerning in this language is that it may turn out that Premium users will also lose PiP for a short while — the supposed period before the feature going out of “experimental” and into “available to everyone” phases.

Or, if we are lucky, it might be an instant swap.

What about the rest of the world?

YouTube has added ad-supported PiP for users in the USA, but not to international markets. We are unsure of the intricacies that are involved in such a move, but we have to imagine that YouTube does want to push the feature out to more people. Platforms like Twitch, Netflix, Apple TV, etc. may not be direct competitors of YouTube, but it’s easy to see how some users might choose to use them instead of YouTube in certain scenarios, simply because they offer PiP.

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