How to Bypass YouTube Picture-in-Picture Block in IOS 14
Just as we thought we’d come up with a clever way to enable picture-in-picture mode for YouTube in iOS 14 – a privilege that YouTube would rather charge you – the company got smarter and devised a workaround that eliminates this particular hack. But there are a few more tricks you can try.
This is all due to YouTube choosing to keep picture-in-picture mode as an exclusive YouTube Premium feature on iOS 14. It can easily be argued that this is a clear violation of Apple’s App Store Verification Guidelines 3.2.2, which lists practices as ” unacceptable” :
“Monetizing built-in hardware or operating system capabilities such as push notifications, camera or gyroscope; or Apple services such as Apple Music or iCloud storage. “
If you expect Apple to follow Google and block the YouTube app for this egregious violation, well, that’s not really Epic Games’ situation . This means that if you try to use our previously suggested trick – open YouTube in Safari to watch a video in picture-in-picture mode – it will no longer work unless you are signed in with a YouTube Premium subscription.
There are still ways to get around this annoying YouTube modification. If you query the YouTube “desktop site” in Safari by clicking on the “aA” icon to the left of the address bar and selecting this option, you can still use YouTube in picture-in-picture mode (for now, anyway).
Another option is to pull out your iPad, where the original YouTube picture-in-picture trick should still work in Safari.
You can also try using this handy shortcut , courtesy of Software Engineer Jonas Reitmann, to launch the YouTube videos you are watching in an iFrame, which will then allow you to go into picture-in-picture mode. There’s also this shortcut , courtesy of Reddit, although this option is a little more complicated (and requires you to install the free Scriptable app). It’s good to have options just in case YouTube starts trying to close more of these loopholes in its attempts to get you to upgrade to YouTube Premium.