One of the key upgrades in Android TV 14 (which powers Google TV as well as Android TV) is the return of picture-in-picture (PiP), which hasn’t been available on Android TV for years now: as Google announced back in May, “qualified” TVs running Android TV 14 will support the feature. However, a new report suggest that even if it’s coming to your specific TV, it’s not going to be the PiP feature you’d expect or want.
The report, from Android Police, says that picture-in-picture will not work as well on Android TV as it does on Android phones. And it’ll exclude some of the very apps you’d expect to use the feature with.
What’s Google doing with Android TV PiP?
The report says that Google is limiting the picture-in-picture feature to four kinds of app categories, with apps required to get specific approval from Google. The categories are:
- Communications services (video and voice calls)
- Smart home integrations (doorbells and baby monitors)
- Health monitoring (fitness trackers)
- Live news tickers (sports scores and stock tickers)
As you can see, there’s no category for the best streaming video services, such as Netflix, or even YouTube. And it doesn’t seem to include other kinds of apps that you might want to use while watching TV, such as a Twitch stream, or watching one sports game fullscreen and another in the window.
Even that limited functionality might not come to your particular TV. That’s because many Android TVs are built to a budget, and often pack fairly low-end processors without a lot of RAM. So it’s unlikely that some of the very cheapest Android or Google TVs will get the feature at all.
There is some good news, however. If it does come to your TV (which will probably include several of the best TVs around, since Google TV is used by Sony, TCL and Hisense – and it’ll come to the Google TV Streamer, of course), the new feature explicitly forbids apps from using PiP windows for advertising and from triggering PiP mode without your permission.
The app category limits described here are for system-wide picture-in-picture, but the feature will also be available to individual developers too – and that means you may be able to get the picture-in-picture features you want from third-party apps on your TV. Still, the limits Google is putting on its own version of the feature seem restrictive – why should we be able to have baseball on in a corner while mainlining Emily in Paris season 4 after its recent debut.