iOS 10 Introduces Autoplay Videos in Safari

Posted on Tuesday, July 26th, 2016

If you ever worked on a website that featured large, full-screen video backgrounds, you probably had to fall back to a still image or animated GIF on mobile. The main reason for this was that iOS did not honour the autoplay functionality that the desktop experience offered. A user interaction was required to trigger the playback of the video, and on the iPhone the video would then play in full screen mode — obscuring the rest of the webpage by default. The best solution at the time was to display an image file on these devices instead.
 
With the rollout of iOS 10 this fall, developers will now be able to use inline autoplay videos on their webpages (as long as there is no audio track, or the audio is muted). This is a big step forward for mobile design and development.
 
To get the full details, check out Jer Noble’s post on the WebKit Blog.