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YouTube’s latest experiment disables picture-in-picture on iOS

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Update: YouTube has officially rolled out PiP to all iOS devices. You can read the unedited version of the original article below:

Although YouTube officially ended its PiP experiment for premium users on April 8, 9to5Google noticed that the feature continued to be supported for signed-up users even after. Our tests yielded the same results, seemingly until the 17.21.3 update rolled out three days ago.

Enabling the new “Unmute mobile search results” experiment on youtube.com/new seems to disable the picture-in-picture feature. Even after updating the YouTube app, an account that did not sign up for the new experiment seemed to have PiP working, as evident from the images below.

YouTube’s PiP feature disappears after enabling the “Unmute mobile search results” experiment. Ignore the video. I honestly couldn’t think of anything else 😉
Don’t try out the “Unmute mobile search results” experiment just yet as you risk losing PiP if you have it enabled.

PiP on iOS has been historically hard to achieve, requiring watching YouTube on a web browser like Google Chrome. Google has plans to roll out PiP to all Youtube Premium users on iOS in the following months, as evidenced by the feature’s launch on YouTube TV.

For now, if you are running the latest YouTube app on iOS and have PiP previously enabled, do not activate any newly launched experiments if you want to continue enjoying the feature.

Please feel free to continue the discussion in the comment section, and we’ll be sure to help you out with any queries.

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About Paul Jacob

Paul’s journey with computers began over a decade ago when he became interested in modeling buildings in SketchUp (back when Google owned it!). Curious about the underlying hardware that powered the tech he used, Paul successfully bricked the first smartphone he owned. Over time, he honed his teardown and repair skills, developing his own homelab and repairing countless gadgets, saving them from the landfill. You can find Paul today either fine-tuning his heavily modified Ender 3 3D printer or searching for used server processors for his HPC. Paul has been blogging in the tech industry for the past five years and is also active academically in computational fluid dynamics, having co-authored multiple journal articles and a conference paper. Paul double-majored in Mechanical Engineering and Physics from BITS Pilani.

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Ed Cruz
2 years ago

I activated the “unmute mobile search results” after app’s update on iPhone. PiP is not available since this. But in my iPad, even I’m not activated the feature test, PiP also disappeared. I guess the issue is update related only.

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Paul Jacob
2 years ago
Reply to  Ed Cruz

Hey Ed. As with most YouTube experiments, I guess the toggle to disable PiP is server-side. You’ll lose it on all iOS devices with the same Google account. I’ve noticed it on iPad too.

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