With iOS 9 being out for nearly five months now, you would’ve expected all the top video apps to already be including picture-in-picture for the iPad. Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be the case with YouTube and a few others. If you’re feeling the hurt from not being able to catch up on your favorite YouTuber’s latest videos while multitasking around your iPad, then check out CornerTube, a new YouTube utility app focused on PIP. CornerTube lets users quickly jump into videos on YouTube, all the while enabling that missing PIP feature. It gets even better once you start utilizing the included Today widget in Notification Center and Action extension in other apps.
With no word in sight on when it will be enabled in the official app, multiple others have offered up their own solutions on a YouTube and PIP feature. CornerTube’s lightweight app has taken that a step further, all the while looking to make the video watching experience faster. The app focuses on getting the user into watching the video they want, without trying to be a full-blown YouTube replacement app. The Today Widget captures any copied YouTube link from the clipboard and places it into your Notification Center, and the Action extension allows you to launch directly into a video from a YouTube link. These are really great when browsing through your Twitter feed when you want to hop right into watching the latest discovered video without leaving the app you’re already using.
The app itself is extremely clean with a focused simplicity on search and finding the content you want immediately. Type in a search term, and you’re presented with a thumbnail grid of all the results. This quickly removes some of the annoyances I have whenever I launch YouTube to watch a single video. I don’t need to see all the recommended channels or videos load before my desired video loads.
CornerTube’s Today widget is a nice addition for those times that I want to watch a video soon, but not far enough out that I would try to add it to my ‘Watch Later’ playlist. The most recent copied YouTube link gets placed into the Today Widget, where you can tap and launch directly into watching it. I really see myself using this whenever I find that latest movie trailer, but can’t quite pull myself away just this second. It also lets you quickly jump between YouTube’s app and CornerTube’s app with PIP ready to go.
CornerTube also includes a really nice Action extension. Personally, I feel this is the most powerful part of the app. Being able to launch directly into a YouTube video using this Action extension is perfect when skimming through Tweetbot. Just tap and hold on a link and launch directly into CornerTube using the ‘Send To CornerTube’ option. The result is the ability to view the YouTube video with picture-in-picture, while going right back to browsing Tweetbot in this example.
CornerTube is available on iOS 9 for iPad via the App Store for $1.99. Picture-in-Picture is available on the iPad Air, iPad Air 2, iPad Pro, and iPad mini 2 or later models. Give CornerTube a try and let us know what you think about the utility, and why you think YouTube is taking its time to support this feature.
