YouTube’s iPhone, iPad Picture-in-Picture ‘Experiment’ Ends in Confusing Mess | What’s Actually Going On?

Google has ended its “experimental” version of picture-in-picture for YouTube users on the iPhone and iPad, but in a confusing turn of events, that may not be the good news we were hoping for.

After multiple reports and a couple of false starts, Google officially launched picture-in-picture for the iOS YouTube app last summer as an “experimental feature” for YouTuber Premium subscribers. This was supposed to be available for a limited time — originally ending in October — but Google extended this several times, first to December, then February, March, and then most recently, April 8.

During this experimental phase, picture-in-picture has been limited to YouTube Premium subscribers. However, the company promised last year that it would eventually roll out to “all US iOS users as well,” with a few limitations.

Now that April 8 is behind us, it appears that YouTube hasn’t extended the experimental feature. What’s worse, the YouTube team has been adding to the confusion, leaving nobody quite sure what’s going on.

While picture-in-picture still seems to work for most folks who had enabled it before it disappeared from YouTube’s Experimental Features page, that’s not true in every case. Further, since YouTube only allows one experimental feature to be enabled at a time, some users found themselves losing picture-in-picture when they decided to try a different feature instead.

Google was largely silent on the matter, leaving us scratching our collective heads until the @TeamYouTube account got our hopes up with a Tweet suggesting that the service was finally rolling out the feature.

Are you using an iOS smartphone? If so, the Picture-in-Picture feature is still rolling out & will be available in a matter of days across all iOS 15+ devices. Tweet back @ us if needed.@TeamYouTube

Sadly, it looks like this was a false alarm. When questioned about the rollout, the TeamYouTube account walked that earlier statement back, clarifying that this was about the rollout of picture-in-picture for YouTube TV that was announced last month and deleting the original tweet.

The new Tweet unequivocally stated that picture-in-picture for the YouTube app is “only available to Premium members on Android mobile phones.”

What’s Going On Here?

As unbelievable as it may seem that Google would cancel its plans for picture-in-picture support, it wouldn’t be entirely surprising. After all, picture-in-picture has been available on the iPad for nearly seven years; it came along with iOS 9 in 2015. Just about everyone except Google was quick to embrace it, to the point where people were wondering what took so long when Netflix didn’t add support until June 2016. Meanwhile, YouTube remained the lone holdout among major video streaming apps, forcing users to avoid the YouTube app entirely to work around it.

It’s not the only area in which Google has dragged its heels when it comes to embracing iPhone and iPad features. Split-screen multitasking also came to the iPad in iOS 9, yet it wasn’t until mid-2020 that the Gmail app actually supported it. Similarly, dark mode in Google Maps didn’t arrive until 2021 — two years after Apple embraced a system-wide dark mode in iOS 13.

It’s also worth keeping in mind that Google clearly stated its plans to bring picture-in-picture to YouTube last year. Specifically, it was to roll out to all Premium members worldwide — which this past few months’ experiment has been about — and eventually to free users in the United States. The latter group reportedly won’t be able to use it to watch music videos, which is already the case with the Android implementation. Still, at least it would be available for other types of content.

So, unless Google plans to renege on that promise, we’re optimistic that the end of the experimental phase may mean that it’s finally getting ready for the wider rollout.

Google doesn’t appear to be actively pulling the plug on the feature for those who already had it enabled; it’s merely taken away the ability for anybody else to opt-in.