Only available for iOS 14.5 beta devices though

Feb 12, 2021 13:51 GMT  ·  By

Back in the fall of 2020, Apple rolled out iOS 14 with so many improvements, and one of the features users loved was support for Picture-in-Picture on a specific website.
 

YouTube was the service that everybody wanted to use in a PiP mode, and to our surprise, the feature was actually available even without a Premium subscription.

This was something totally unexpected, apparently even for Google itself, as the search giant eventually decided that iPhone users shouldn’t be able to load YouTube in Picture-in-Picture unless they have a YouTube Premium subscription.

So eventually, the company blocked this feature, only for PiP to return on YouTube in Safari at some point in October. The same thing happened again, so YouTube’s PiP mode when the video-sharing service was loaded in a browser eventually got the ax for the second time.

And now it’s back

The release of iOS 14.5 beta a few days ago seems to have enabled YouTube PiP on iPhone once again. The feature works not only in Safari but also in third-party browsers like Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, and the way you can activate it is similar to how everything was supposed to be from the very beginning in iOS 14.

Just load YouTube in Safari, click on the video you want to view in PiP, expand it to full screen and then tap the dedicated PiP button that allows you to run the clip in its dedicated popup on the screen.

Once again, you don’t need a YouTube Premium subscription for the whole thing, so it’ll certainly be interesting to see if Google blocks it for the third time or not.

Until this happens, keep in mind the feature is only available for users running the beta build of iOS 14.5, so it’ll certainly be interesting to see if it sticks around until this OS version gets the go-ahead for production devices too.