Chrome on Android tablets will finally stop audio when you close Picture-in-Picture

On the tablet version of Chrome, audio does not pause when you exit a Picture-in-Picture window for now. That’s about to change soon.

A Chromium Gerrit commit mentions “Suspend media when the fullscreen video PiP window is closed.” Suspending media playback when the PiP window is closed is what the user expects, since it’s an intentional action performed when someone wants to stop the entire video from playing, including the audio.

The commit goes on to mention how exiting the PiP window does not stop playback on “large form factors,” referring to Android tablets.

The simplest way to explain this: I’ve opened a video in PiP on my Android phone. After hitting the close (X) button, it stops the video (as expected), but also stops playing the audio. However, on tablets, this doesn’t happen. The audio continues to play, and you’ll need to pause it manually either from the notification panel or from the YouTube app.

That’s what’s changing soon — you don’t have to clear the app from RAM, specifically pause from the YouTube app or notifications, or hit the close button after pausing the video. It’ll happen automatically, and it’s a good quality-of-life change.

At the time of writing, this change to the audio functionality is still in the “Gerrit commit” stage. It has been reviewed and committed, but it has not made it to the stable or beta versions of Chrome yet. For some users, the change might start showing up in Chrome Canary initially. Either way, a release timeline is unclear; it could take a few months before users start seeing this change in Chrome stable.

Speaking of the Android app, it recently got a simplified settings menu. More on that here.

In other Google news, there’s some trouble with Google Passkeys. We covered that here.

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