> Picture in picture works just fine on Windows and Android without a YouTube Premium account. Is this something specific to iPhone?
Google decided that in YouTube for iOS the feature would be premium only, at least for now. Maybe they feel iOS users are more easily monetized. Who knows. It most certainly isn't a limitation of the platform.
> stripping out the ads is dangerously close to "I just want this for free, so I'll steal it"
I never use YouTube intentionally. The service is a bit of the perfect example of boiling a frog, with one short skippable ad becoming multiple skippable ads becoming multiple unskippable ads becoming multiple unskippable ads plus interstitial ads, on top of the content itself almost always having sleezy "sponsored by" advertising content. It's simply remarkable how what was supposedly the new world that would break us free from the classic television model has somehow gotten so much worse.
That doesn't really address your point, but it is kind of tough to feel too sympathetic. The morality becomes...clouded.
> On the other hand the fact that the entire thing seems to be Apple ecosystem
Google decided to be extra greedy towards iOS users, so users helped solve it. Sounds like you're giving it a thumbs up.
Yeah I just want to suss out that picture in picture is indeed working just fine for iOS users as it is documented as working by Apple. Do other sites activate PiP reliably? Note that PiP on mobile has always required (stupidly so) that you be in full screen mode prior to activating it. In my own experience, making picture in picture trigger on iOS on my own video apps seems to be fleeting. Can someone on iOS check in on alternative video sites to see if PiP is triggering reliably?
I don't use iOS, if you say YouTube is treating it differently than Android and blocking said feature, that sucks and they should change that for sure. Just seems like there may be problems on Safari/iOS (and the underlying WebKit framework that all or most third party iOS browsers use) more than on other platforms/browsers
> Yeah I just want to suss out that picture in picture is indeed working just fine for iOS users as it is documented as working by Apple.
It does not. I just re-tried (iPhone XR on the latest version of iOS). If I jump out of Safari I get the PiP video for about half a second and it disappears. It works great with Vinegar, as advertised. Websites that use the standard video tag work as they should as well, from what I have seen.
> I don't use iOS, if you say YouTube is treating it differently than Android and blocking said feature, that sucks and they should change that for sure.
Indeed. And in the meantime I will work around them. And if they block it, I’ll just YouTube-dl stuff ahead of time. And keep laughing when Google devs whine about Safari not supporting Chrome’s HTML extension du jour.
PiP works perfectly everywhere else so I assumed this is like when Google breaks Firefox and slacks on fixing it, where it might not have started as a deliberate attempt but someone intentionally keeps fixing it off of the development schedule.
Google decided that in YouTube for iOS the feature would be premium only, at least for now. Maybe they feel iOS users are more easily monetized. Who knows. It most certainly isn't a limitation of the platform.
> stripping out the ads is dangerously close to "I just want this for free, so I'll steal it"
I never use YouTube intentionally. The service is a bit of the perfect example of boiling a frog, with one short skippable ad becoming multiple skippable ads becoming multiple unskippable ads becoming multiple unskippable ads plus interstitial ads, on top of the content itself almost always having sleezy "sponsored by" advertising content. It's simply remarkable how what was supposedly the new world that would break us free from the classic television model has somehow gotten so much worse.
That doesn't really address your point, but it is kind of tough to feel too sympathetic. The morality becomes...clouded.
> On the other hand the fact that the entire thing seems to be Apple ecosystem
Google decided to be extra greedy towards iOS users, so users helped solve it. Sounds like you're giving it a thumbs up.