How do videos autoplay on iOS at youtube.com

Question

When I set autoplay to true for a YouTube video (IFrame API) on my site, it doesn't work. All the documentation says apple disables autoplay on ios for bandwidth reasons.

However, I see that videos play automatically (without clicking on the video element) on youtube.com on iPad. How did YouTube make it work? It would be hard to imagine Apple does something special just for YouTube.

Solution

It seems that Youtube's team uses the interaction of the user when taps/clicks a video button to authorize the reproduction.

Remember that youtube.com is a SPA (Single Page Application) so there is no page reload or redirection.

So, youtube.com doesn't have autoplay enabled.

Comments

[mpobrien]

This doesn't answer the question, and it's not a duplicate. The OP is asking why autoplay does appear to work if you visit the youtube.com homepage on iOS (it does for me, too).

[Nicolas Miari]

So, they're manipulating the DOM and the URL to make it appear as if you are moving between different pages?

[Aitor Aznar Álvarez]

Yes, with plain javascript and managing navigation with "history pushState". Checkout this for more info about autoplay: stackoverflow.com/questions/29894406/…

[Jay]

Tested this and it does not work in Safari on iOS 9.1 and Chrome on iOS 9.1 See the answer by Aitor Aznar Álvarez on how YouTube does it on their mobile version.

[Bas van Stein]

I seriously hate ios 9.1.. thank you for the comment, at the moment of writing ios still worked but that was before this "downgrade".

[mjwunderlich]

This works on a laptop / desktop browser. Does not work on mobile iOS browser. May or may not work on Android.

[Aitor Aznar Álvarez]

The rules about autoplay has changed, especially in Chrome. Take into account this developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Media/Autoplay_guide and this developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/…