How to Split Screen on iPhone: What's Actually Possible, and the Picture in Picture Workaround
If you’re looking up how to split screen on iPhone, here’s the answer before you go digging through Settings: there is no switch for it. iPhone doesn’t have split-screen multitasking. Running two apps side by side is an iPad feature, and no iPhone model offers it, including the biggest ones.
That doesn’t leave you stuck with one thing at a time. iOS has a few tools that cover most of the reasons people want a split screen, and one of them, Picture in Picture, really does put two things on screen at once. Here’s how each one works and where it stops.
Does iPhone split screen exist? No, and here’s what gets confused with it
On iPad, Split View puts two apps next to each other with a divider you can drag, and Slide Over parks a third app in a narrow floating panel. Recent iPadOS versions have reworked this around resizable windows, and the details change between releases. None of it exists on iPhone. If a guide tells you to drag an app out of the Dock to the side of the screen, it was written about an iPad.
Two things get mistaken for iPhone Split View:
- Two-column layouts in landscape. Some larger iPhones show a sidebar plus content when you rotate certain Apple apps, such as Mail or Notes. That’s one app with a wider layout, not two apps.
- “Split screen” apps on the App Store. These are typically two web browser panes inside a single app. Useful if both things you need are websites. They can’t load the apps on your Home Screen.
What iPhone gives you instead
| You want to | Use |
|---|---|
| Watch a video while doing something else | Picture in Picture |
| Stay on a FaceTime call while you look something up | Picture in Picture |
| Bounce between two apps quickly | Swipe along the bottom edge |
| Keep an eye on a timer, a delivery or a score | Live Activities on the Lock Screen or Dynamic Island |
| Read a foreign-language app with a translation next to it | A floating translation window (covered below) |
How to use Picture in Picture on iPhone
Picture in Picture has been part of iOS since iOS 14. It shrinks a video or a FaceTime call into a small window that stays on top while you use other apps.
- Open Settings > General > Picture in Picture and make sure Start PiP Automatically is on.
- Play a video full screen in an app that supports it (the Apple TV app, Safari and many streaming apps do), or start a FaceTime video call.
- Swipe up from the bottom edge to go Home, or press the Home button on older iPhones. The video drops into a floating window. Many players also have a PiP button that does the same thing.
- Open any other app. The window stays put.
Once it’s floating:
- Drag it to any corner.
- Pinch to resize it, or double-tap to jump between sizes.
- Swipe it off the left or right edge to hide it. Audio keeps playing, and a small tab lets you pull it back.
- Tap it once for play/pause, close, and the button that returns you to the full app.
Two caveats. The app has to support it: YouTube’s app, for example, has its own rules about who gets PiP, which have depended on Premium membership and region. And the window only holds video content. You can’t put Notes, Messages or a calculator in it.
Quick app switching, the other half of iPhone multitasking
For everything that isn’t video, iPhone’s answer is switching fast rather than showing both.
- On iPhones with Face ID, swipe right along the bottom edge to jump to the previous app, and left to come back. With two apps it works like a toggle.
- Swipe up from the bottom and pause to open the App Switcher. On Home button iPhones, double-click the button.
- Copy in one app, switch, paste in the other.
Fine for grabbing an address or a code. Poor for anything you need to compare, because you only ever see one side.
Why people want split screen on iPhone for translation
A very common reason to want two apps at once is a translator. You’re in a shopping app, a game or a chat in a language you can’t read, and you want the translation beside it. On Android you’d put a translator in the other half of the screen. On iPhone you screenshot, translate, switch back, find your place and repeat.
The built-in options are worth knowing. Safari can translate whole web pages in the languages it supports. Live Text lets you select text in a screenshot or photo and translate it. Apple’s Translate app handles typed text and the camera. All three are solid and free, all work one screen at a time, and the last two pull you out of the app you were using. More on those routes in our Circle to Search for iPhone guide.
A floating translation window, the closest thing to iPhone Split View
iOS doesn’t let apps draw over other apps (that’s also why bubble translators never came to iPhone). The one exception is the Picture in Picture window from the section above.
PiP Translate, listed on the App Store as PiP Screen Translate, uses that window for translation instead of video:
- Start an iOS screen broadcast from the app.
- Switch to the app you want to read.
- A PiP window floats over it showing the same screen with the text translated.
No screenshots, no switching. The window behaves like any other PiP window: drag it to a corner, pinch to resize, swipe it off the edge when it’s in the way. It covers 100+ languages (pick the source language yourself for the best results), has a Manga Mode for Japanese, Korean and Chinese sources, and works over native apps, games, browsers and readers, since it reads whatever is on screen.
What it won’t do
- It isn’t a second app. The window is a translated view of your screen, not something you can type or scroll in. If you need two interactive apps, that still means an iPad.
- It runs slightly behind. The translation trails the screen by about one to two seconds.
- Some text reads badly. Handwriting, stylized or decorative fonts, very small text and fast animation all reduce accuracy. Zooming in helps.
- It needs a connection. Text recognition runs on the phone, and only the recognized text is sent to the cloud for translation.
- Protected video shows nothing. Some subscription streaming apps block screen capture for DRM-protected video. When they do, iOS hands every screen-reading app a black frame, so there’s nothing to translate.
It’s free to download. Unlimited translation needs a Pro subscription.
PiP Translate is on the App Store. For the longer walkthrough, see how to translate your iPhone screen live.