Support Picture-in-Picture (PiP) for camera/video Lovelace cards in the Android app

[coturwood]

The Picture-in-Picture button on Lovelace video/camera cards (e.g. the custom:webrtc-camera card) doesn't work when the dashboard is opened inside the Android Companion app. The exact same dashboard, opened in Chrome on the same device, works correctly and enters PiP without issues.
Cause
Lovelace cards trigger PiP via the browser's standard HTMLVideoElement.requestPictureInPicture() API. This API only succeeds if the hosting Android app declares native PiP support (android:supportsPictureInPicture="true" in the Activity manifest) and handles the transition into Android's system-level picture-in-picture mode. The WebView used inside the Companion app doesn't currently provide this, so the web-level PiP request has nowhere to go and silently fails — regardless of whether the connection is local HTTP or remote HTTPS.
Proposed solution
Add native PiP support to the Companion app's main Activity, so PiP requests originating from Lovelace cards (camera feeds, media players, etc.) can actually enter Android's picture-in-picture mode, matching the behavior already available when using a standard mobile browser.

[jpelgrom]

Android WebView does not support this at all it seems: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Picture-in-Picture_API#browser_compatibility

However, if a video is playing the app (with Exoplayer) might detect this and show picture in picture if you press home while playing. Did you try this?

[coturwood]

Thanks, that's it — confirmed! Home gesture while a camera feed is playing does trigger PiP automatically via ExoPlayer's native detection. So the underlying support is there. The remaining gap is just that the in-card PiP button (requestPictureInPicture() from the Lovelace card itself) doesn't do anything, since the WebView doesn't implement that API — users have to know to swipe up/press Home instead, which isn't discoverable at all from the UI. Would still be nice if tapping the button could trigger the same native PiP path the app already has, but this is much more of a "nice to have" now that a working method exists. Il lun 24 ago 2026, 10:01 Joris Pelgröm ***@***.***> ha scritto:

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