A change for the better: YouTube finally supports Split View and Slide Over on iPads

Thankfully, the latter issue was fixed a couple of months ago – nowadays, if you pull up the Control Center for a quick brightness adjustment, drop down the notifications shade to check on your messages, or pull in the Slide Over drawer on an iPad, YouTube will not stop its video playback. However, the more advanced functions, featured on the iPad Air 2 and iPad Pro, such as Split View and Picture-in-Picture are still not supported by YouTube's official app, which has users looking for alternative players that do allow for these modes.
Well, the official YouTube app has been updated yesterday and, while there's no word on Picture-in-Picture support, we are happy to say that it now fully allows for Slide Over and Split View. If you're not clear on what the differences between these two are – here's a quick recap:
- Slide Over is the “poor man's multitasking” window. It's supported by iPad mini 2 and up, iPad Air and up. It doesn't allow for two apps to run simultaneously on the screen. Instead, it allows you to pull in a secondary app from the side of the screen, for quick peek-in peek-out actions. While the Slide Over drawer is open, the full-screen app gets dimmed and remains inactive until the former is closed. The recent YouTube update allows the app to be placed in the small slide-in drawer.
- Split View is the true multitasking, which allows apps to run simultaneously side by side. It's supported by iPad mini 4, iPad Air 2, and the iPad Pros. In order for an app to support Split View, however, it needs to be allowed by the developer. In the case of YouTube, Google has just now allowed users to use the app in this manner. So, you can view your videos and reply to emails at the same time.
source: YouTube (App Store)
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