Tech

Android N’s multi-window multitasking mode is a very promising start

You’ll find a pretty satisfying version of the concept under all the early bugs.

Andrew Cunningham – Mar 9, 2016 8:40 pm | 72

Once you've done that, you can then open up a second app from the recent apps list... Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Google has dropped an early version of the Android N preview months before Google I/O, which is when we first saw the Android M preview build last year. Developer images for most recent Nexus devices went up on Google’s site today, and we’ve already got them running on some phones and tablets, and we’re digging in.

The most significant new feature, at least if you’re still holding out hope for Android tablets, is a multi-window multitasking mode not unlike the ones in iOS 9, Samsung’s version of Android, or Windows 8 and 10. It has come a long way since we saw the janky, hidden, mostly broken version of it included in early Marshmallow previews. It’s about as buggy and crash-prone as you’d expect from an early build of an upcoming OS, but underneath those bugs is a multitasking UI that’s actually pretty elegant, and it offers some nice improvements over the Split View mode introduced in iOS 9.

Understanding the basics

Android is iOS-like in that it seems to designate a “primary” and “secondary” app—we’ll use these terms to specify which app we’re talking about during this explainer. The primary app, chosen when you turn on multitasking mode, is on the left or the top half of the screen and is more-or-less pinned to that section of the screen. The secondary app, selected from the Recent Apps list or home screen once you’ve fired up multitasking mode, is on the right side of the screen and is easily switchable.

There are two ways to turn on multitasking mode. If you’re in an app, you can long-press the square recent apps button, which turns the square into two small rectangles and snaps the app you’re currently using to the left (or top) side of the screen. If you’re on the home screen, bring up the recent apps list and then press and drag one of the apps to an edge of the screen (part of the screen will get a translucent white overlay, which shows you roughly where you can drag the app window). In both cases, the primary app will go to its side of the screen, and you’ll be able to pick your secondary app from the recent apps list.

The two apps are split by a slider with a small white line in the middle to indicate that it can be resized; the default split is 50/50, but you can also give one app two-thirds of the screen and make the other use the remaining third. Unlike iOS, which only allows your primary app to control the majority of the screen, Android lets you split things pretty much however you want. There’s apparently a “freeform mode” available for “manufacturers of larger devices” that removes these hard-and-fast ratios, but it’s definitely not an option on the Nexus 9 I used for testing.

When you’re in multitasking mode, you can switch between apps in one of two ways. Hit the bifurcated recent apps button, and the secondary app’s window will become a normal recent apps list for you to page through. Hit the home button, and both apps will get out of the way—the secondary app will disappear entirely, while the primary app will slide up (in portrait mode) or to the left (in landscape). Tap the app you want to launch, and it will come up in the secondary app window while the primary app slides back in from where it was hiding. In landscape mode you can actually see the rightmost edge of the app peeking out at you, showing you where it went.

To get out of multitasking mode, you can long-press the recent apps list again, which will restore the primary app to full-screen mode. You can also drag the slider all the way to the left or right edge, which will close one app and make the other full-screen.

To “officially” support multitasking mode in Android N, apps will need to target N’s API level (probably 24 in the final version—the current preview identifies itself as level 23, which is also 6.0’s API level) and add a new android:resizableActivity property to apps to specify how they behave when they’re being launched and resized (or disable multi-window mode support altogether). Another property enables support for dragging and dropping things between apps. But all of the third-party apps I tried that didn’t demand full-screen mode or a fixed-screen orientation seemed to work pretty well, albeit after showing me a warning that they might not work properly. Android apps already have to work on a bunch of different screen sizes, so unlike with iOS most of them are already resolution-independent. In fact, the longstanding criticism of Android tablet apps—that they’re just stretched-out phone apps that expand to fill whatever space they’re given—actually serves the OS pretty well in split-screen mode. One split tablet screen is really just two phone screens next to each other, right?

It should be noted that, as in iOS, Android cannot be used to run two instances of the same app next to each other at the same time. You can sometimes get around this by running two similar apps next to each other—the stable and beta versions of the Chrome apps, for example—but these mobile OSes were originally designed to run one full-screen app at a time, and they’ll take time to shed that legacy completely if they shed it at all.

How does it stack up?

Bear in mind that this is still an early preview, and Google is likely to make changes to the way this feature works before Android N is officially launched later in the year. But compared to what Apple is doing in iOS and what Samsung is doing to make the same feature work on its Android tablets, Google’s implementation actually seems pretty elegant.

In landscape mode on a tablet, at least, Android is better than iOS at showing you where your app “windows” are going, and on which side of the screen they’ll show up. For instance, Android apps peek out at you from the left side of the screen when you’re multitasking, showing you that you’re still in multitasking mode and that the app will slide back over from the left once you’ve opened another app. Hitting the home button while multitasking in iOS just shows you a normal home screen, making the multitasking UI completely vanish and reappear as you switch apps. In Android, when you bring up the recent apps list, you swipe through it and bring up your app on the same chunk of the screen—you know the primary app hasn’t gone anywhere, and you know where that secondary app is going to open when you tap it. iOS has separate UIs for switching between primary and secondary apps, neither of which are as quick or as functional.

Google’s implementation also improves on Samsung’s in almost every way. It’s easier to tell what you’re doing when you’re resizing an app since you can see a preview in real-time—Samsung’s just shows you a blue line that approximates where your window’s edge will be after the apps finish redrawing themselves. Google makes it easy to switch between apps without entering and exiting multi-window mode constantly, which is what you’ll be doing on Samsung’s tablets. And while Samsung does let you arbitrarily resize windows however you want, it also lets you resize them so much that they look pretty bad. Google’s and Apple’s fixed dividers are good enough most of the time.

All of that said, the multi-window mode tends to work better in landscape mode than portrait mode, with (slightly) fewer bugs. In portrait mode, you don’t see the edges of apps peeking down from the top of the Home screen to let you know where they’ve gone. The navigation UI at the top of app windows tends to take up a lot more space in portrait mode, since it’s typically designed with smaller, narrower phone screens in mind (in other words, apps are designed to be horizontally constrained, and as such waste more space in multi-window portrait mode than they do in landscape). And while the feature is a no-brainer on tablets like the Nexus 9 and Pixel C, it’s less usable and less useful on a 5-inch phone screen.

And finally, as someone who works with a lot of text, the ability to hook up a Bluetooth mouse and get a basic cursor is great. iOS 9 made a small step in this direction by allowing you to transform the software keyboard into a temporary trackpad of sorts, but Android’s OS-wide (albeit pretty basic) mouse support will make the whole thing feel more “computer-y” if you’re trying to use it in a keyboard dock as a laptop replacement.

Andrew Cunningham Senior Technology Reporter

Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.

72 Comments