It’s Not Just You: YouTube’s Picture-in-Picture Feature Isn’t Working.
Picture-in-picture (PiP) mode is great for multitaskers. Some prefer to focus entirely on the content, while others prefer to watch videos while doing other tasks. I often watch videos in PiP mode on my iPhone and Mac while simultaneously skimming headlines, chatting with friends, or doing other tasks that only require half my attention.
While there are ways to manually initiate picture-in-picture mode, it’s more convenient on mobile devices because most video playback apps use a natural method: once a video starts playing, you can simply exit the app, and the video will continue playing in the picture-in-picture window. On iOS, this has become a familiar experience for me: I open YouTube, select a video, and close the app, confident that the video will continue playing while I navigate to other apps on my iPhone.
YouTube’s picture-in-picture feature doesn’t work (especially on iOS).
Of course, like most things, picture-in-picture mode is only good when it works . You may have recently tried exactly what I just described and found that nothing happens. You close YouTube, but your video doesn’t appear in the picture-in-picture window. (It may still play in the background, though.) And while some of you may be using Android, I’m willing to bet most of you are using iPhone. What’s going on?
According to 9to5Google , YouTube is currently experiencing issues with picture-in-picture mode. This issue isn’t limited to a small group of users. Apparently, it’s so widespread that YouTube has directly acknowledged it. In a statement on YouTube’s help page, a Google employee stated the following:
“We’re aware that some of you are experiencing issues with the picture-in-picture (PiP) feature not working when exiting the YouTube app. While the vast majority of these reports are coming from iOS users, we are also seeing a significantly smaller number of reports from Android users… Our teams are actively investigating this issue, and we will update this thread as soon as we receive more information.” At the time of writing, more than 11,600 users have clicked the “I have the same question” button on this YouTube help post.
Is there a way to fix the picture-in-picture issue in the YouTube app?
Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a workaround. Incidentally, this morning, the picture-in-picture feature in my YouTube app on iOS was intermittent. I could switch to picture-in-picture mode during ads without a problem, but as soon as the video started playing, the picture-in-picture stopped working. What’s more, the video itself stopped playing. I went back to YouTube, played the video again, and this time the picture-in-picture feature reactivated when I exited the app. This continued intermittently: sometimes it didn’t work, sometimes it worked.