One of iOS 14’s big new features is Picture-in-Picture mode, which lets you watch a video in a small window while you do other things on your iPhone.
For example, watching a YouTube video in Safari while chatting with your friends or checking email.
Unfortunately, it appears that YouTube has done something to prevent videos from continuing to play when PIP mode is activated – unless you pay for YouTube Premium.
iOS 14’s picture-in-picture mode doesn’t work with YouTube in Safari. ???? pic.twitter.com/JwGLAmwhwb— Jay Peters ???? (@jaypeters) September 18, 2020
Try it out by opening a video on the YouTube website in the Safari browser of your iPhone and making it full screen and tapping the playback controls, you should see a picture-in-picture icon in the upper-left corner of your screen. Click on it, and the video will briefly jump to a small window, and suddenly it will return to its usual place on YouTube.
And if you try to return to the home screen while watching a full-screen video, you’ll see it flash briefly in picture-in-picture mode and then disappear.
Picture-in-Picture mode and if you have YouTube Premium, the Picture-in-Picture feature will work as expected.
But it doesn’t work properly if you are a free user. That wasn’t the case as recently as yesterday, according to MacRumors, and I remember it was running on iOS 14 beta ahead of the software’s official release this week.
Picture-in-picture mode still works with YouTube videos in Safari if you’re using an iPad, regardless of whether you have a Free or Premium account.
It’s not clear if this is a bug or if YouTube removed the functionality intentionally.
As for YouTube’s own application, YouTube is stopping the ability to play videos in the background for YouTube Premium subscribers.
It seems plausible that YouTube would want to restrict Picture-in-Picture to non-paying subscribers if Google and Apple haven’t made a statement about the flaw.
