Hi guys,
I was so pleased to find this thread that I created an account just to reply. Beyond one or two mentions on Twitter this is the only place I've seen anyone talking about this, maybe because of the NDA?
Anyway, I'm seeing the exact same problem with video podcasts using the native Podcasts app on iOS 9. I installed the first public beta on day one, and one of the first things I did was to watch a video podcast because for 30% of its time that's all my iPad does. As soon as this problem manifest I submitted a bug report via the Feedback Assistant and rolled back to iOS 8.4.1.
Yesterday, in preparation for tomorrow's official iOS 9 launch, I installed the public 9.1 beta in the hope of seeing that this 'bug' had been eradicated, and was heartbroken to see that it's still there. Either Apple are ridiculously slow to respond to bug reports (and don't have anyone in internal QA who watches full screen video podcasts) or this is actually a feature. Why they would change this is beyond me, but there it is.
The thing is (and this is where the waters muddy a bit) I was almost certain that when I very first installed the public beta of 9.0 and ran Podcasts, the video I'd previously been watching
did in fact play full screen. The reason I remember was that even though my iPad is 4th generation and not compatible with Slide Over, I wanted to try the action to see if anything happened, especially if it crashed. When the full screen problem occurred I was convinced that it was the attempt to use Slide Over with incompatible hardware that had caused it. If memory serves I even mentioned this to Apple in the bug report.
The problem is that nothing I've tried, including multiple restores and reinstalls of the beta, has brought back the full screen video. I've even deleted the iPad from my AppleID and used Recovery Mode to set it up as a brand new device, divorced in every way from my iCloud account or any local backups, just in case a rogue
plist key caused by my tampering was being re-synced back to the machine. But all to no avail.
Unless there's an even deeper erase method than Recovery Mode followed by a factory restore, I'm stumped. I can only conclude that my memory is letting me down when it comes to having seen full screen podcast video on iOS 9.
If any of this sounds familiar to the OP, especially the bit about trying Slide Over, I'd love to hear about it. I'm still harbouring the hope that this might be a very obscure bug rather than a design choice. If it's the latter, then for the first time in my iOS device life I'm going to have to consider
not upgrading to the latest release because full screen video really is that important to me. Either that or I'll have to look for a third-party solution.