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More iPhone and iPad users are getting YouTube picture-in-picture mode

More people will now be able to watch YouTube videos in a floating window while using other apps thanks to Google's picture-in-picture mode for iOS and iPadOS.

The feature should be available soon for people running iOS 15, although some fragmentation is still evident.

As long as they live in an area where YouTube Premium is available, YouTube Premium subscribers should be able to access the feature no matter where they live, and watch anything they want.

The only mention of picture-in-picture on YouTube for non-paying users is in the US. However, the company says that 'everybody who uses YouTube on iPhone or iPad' will get the feature, but it can only be used for non-music content. For Android users, this feature has been available for years, and YouTube says it hasn't changed.

For some Premium subscribers (like myself), who have been able to access picture-in-picture mode via a variety of methods for quite some time, this news may seem confusing.

By June 2021, the company plans to offer picture-in-picture to both paying customers and free users. Premium subscribers were able to enable it by August.

After the experiment ended in April 2022, YouTube stopped accepting new users. During that time, the company promised to share more information about the feature.

The upshot is that getting to today's announcement has been a bit of a bumpy ride (even though some of us enabled it last year). The company acknowledges this in its tweets and blog post, where it acknowledges that it's been a slow roll out for a highly requested feature.

In its tweet, it says the feature is being slowly rolled out, but in its blog post it says it will arrive 'over the next several days.'  The company has also given itself some wiggle room for this phase to take a while.

The YouTube app can be accessed by playing a video, leaving it, and then returning to the home screen or another app.

The video should appear in a floating window if your account has picture-in-picture enabled. 

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