Free Picture-in-Picture YouTube Returns to IOS 14
YouTube has previously blocked a fancy hack that allows you to stream its content using iOS 14’s picture-in-picture capabilities for free. For reasons unknown, the company changed course and you can access the built-in iOS feature without a YouTube Premium subscription. Here’s how to do it.
All you have to do is open the main YouTube site in Safari . instead of using the YouTube app. Click to play the video and then put it full screen using the small square icon in the lower right corner.
Once you’ve done that, look for the picture-in-picture icon, which looks like one large window pointing to a smaller window. You cannot miss this. (It’s to the right of the giant “X”).
Your video will be scaled down to picture-in-picture size and you can now log out of YouTube viewer and do whatever you want on your iPhone (or iPad). You can move the video around the screen as needed, although you will only be able to pin it to the four corners of your device (alas).
If Safari doesn’t work for you, this trick works in both Chrome and Firefox using the same methods, and it works with any YouTube video, including all of the service’s music videos. This is in contrast to the built-in picture-in-picture setting that Android uses in its YouTube app, which disallows picture-in-picture for music content unless you subscribe to YouTube Premium.
There is a way to use picture-in-picture mode for free in the iOS 14 YouTube app, but you have to use a third-party workaround that drops the shortcut in your Share sheet in hacked-together picture-in-picture mode to do this. I haven’t tried it myself, but it’s worth spending some time exploring if you want picture-in-picture mode but don’t want to open a browser window to get it.
As for why YouTube has changed its mind and is allowing this feature to work again, who can say? But I’m glad the workaround came back. It’s not good to ask users to pay more for a standard iOS feature. Worse, YouTube has been actively blocking one of Apple ‘s own apps from accessing the built-in functions of the operating system. I’m genuinely surprised Apple didn’t get bored with this, but perhaps these conversations took place behind closed doors. (The company is a bit busy with another social war at the moment).
Only in the case of YouTube pulls a rare double turn and kills safari picture-in-picture Hack once again, we have also covered some additional workarounds that can be used to restore the function. We won’t be held back from our precious picture-in-picture mode!
This post was originally published in August 2020 and was updated in October 2020 to reflect the fact that after a short period of time, the feature under study has become functional again.