TL;DRYouTube’s picture-in-picture mode is broken on both Android and iOS. Google acknowledged the bug and says its teams are “actively investigating.“
YouTube’s picture-in-picture mode is failing on both Android and iOS for a growing number of users. When the app is exited, the audio continues playing in the background but the floating video overlay does not appear. Google acknowledged the bug in a YouTube Help forum post, saying “our teams are actively investigating the issue.” Most reports are from iPhone users, but the problem is also appearing on Android.
Picture-in-picture was one of YouTube Premium’s most popular features before Google made it available to all users earlier this year. It lets viewers keep watching a video in a small floating window while using other apps. Google has been overhauling its products around AI this year, but this bug appears to be a straightforward software regression rather than a feature change. There is no workaround. Users experiencing the issue will have to wait for a fix.
Google did not provide a timeline for when the fix would ship or specify what caused the regression. DuckDuckGo installs jumped 18% after Google’s AI search overhaul, and YouTube’s app reliability is one of the few areas where Google faces no serious competition. Breaking a feature that was until recently a paid perk, weeks after making it free, is the kind of bug that erodes the goodwill the free rollout was supposed to build.
