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Jonas Reitmann

Hey there, I am Jonas, a software engineer living and working in Hamburg, Germany at Closelink, a technology company in the maritime industry. Read my blog posts here!

09/19/2020

YouTube Picture in Picture on iOS without Premium

iOS 14 brought Picture in Picture support to the iPhone. Unfortunately, YouTube only supports PiP for YouTube Premium subscribers. It used to work without a YouTube Premium subscription using mobile Safari but YouTube recently disabled this functionality.

Good news: There is a simple workaround. I built a little website and iOS shortcut, so one can easily open a YouTube video in mobile Safari and then use PiP again! ✨ See it in action here.


Download the shortcut here

How does it work?

The website accepts a URL parameter with a YouTube URL or video ID. It then shows an iFrame for the particular video. You can find the code here.

The shortcut accepts a URL and then builds the needed URL for the website, e.g. https://6d4uz.csb.app?v=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Obgnr9pc820. Thanks for the help with Shortcuts, Philipp!

Let's hope, YouTube does not disable PiP for iFrames as well.