Google Tests Desktop Windowing For Android Tablets

Google is testing a "desktop windowing" feature for Android tablets that "will let you resize apps freely and arrange them on your screen at will," reports The Verge. It's currently available as a developer preview. From the report: Currently, apps on Android tablets open in full-screen by default. When the new mode is enabled, each app will appear in a window with controls that allow you to reposition, maximize, or close the app. You'll also see a taskbar at the bottom of your screen with your running apps. [...] Once the feature is rolled out to everyone, you can turn it on by pressing and holding the window handle at the top of an app's screen. If you have a keyboard attached, you can also use the shortcut meta key (Windows, Command, or Search) + Ctrl + Down to activate desktop mode. (You can exit the mode by closing all your active apps or by dragging a window and dragging it to the top of your screen.)

Google notes that apps locked to portrait orientation are still resizable, which might make things look a bit weird if certain apps aren't optimized. However, Google plans to address this in a future update by scaling the UI of non-resizable apps while maintaining their aspect ratio.

tiling would make me happy

[johnjones]

a good tiling window manager

I typically only use 3 "apps"

browser
terminal
video conf

if they can be tiled the way I want and have colour correction for the screen I would switch to that mode in an instant like i3

Re:tiling would make me happy

[Viol8]

Not too many ways you can tile 3 windows tbh and while tiling works on a large monitor/TV, on a tablet sized screen you're not going to get much real estate on any of them. Far better to have them overlapping as per a standard desktop.

Re:

[fluffernutter]

Personally I don't get tiling window managers. Once you split the screen more than twice the window is too small to do anything in anyway, and I can do two side by side windows fine in a non-tiling window manager.

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[MeNeXT]

It depends on the resolution and the size of the screen. 8K, 55 ~ and up can be split more than twice and still be readable.

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[fluffernutter]

But you would have to be sitting awfully close to the screen, no?

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[MeNeXT]

Same a a regular monitor. Just think of it as having 4 monitors in a grid without any dead space between them.

I have an 8K 55" TV as a monitor. You may need to adjust the font size for your needs.

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[dargaud]

I tried to use a 4K monitor for a few days for programming, but I don't know how some people do it. The chars are so small that I had to get much closer to the screen than usual, but then my eyes were straining. Get stronger eyeglasses maybe ? And with 2 monitors I can already have the IDE, the prog being debugged, the help/documentation and a console or browser or file manager all side by side without too much crowding, what's the point of putting everything (and more) on the same screen...? And if the sol

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[MeNeXT]

4K on 24" would be very small but clear. 4K on 32 is nice. 8K on 55 is a little small but on 65 or 75 it's like a regular monitor.

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[drinkypoo]

4k 42.5" TV here, it's like having four 21" 1080p displays together and everything is quite legible. Great for gaming but even better for productivity. Drag windows into the corners to get normal sizes, drag them to the left or right edges to get tall windows... Unfortunately all of the cheap ones (~$300) have problems and this LG is no exception, it has some banding and stuff at the very edges gets dark because they cheaped out on the backlight a bit. If I had unlimited budget I'd get an OLED in this size,

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[SpzToid]

I gotta agree. 4K TVs make extremely good monitors, (and I don't use the TV function, only the HDMI display). 32" to 43" are a sweet-spot. I'm using a 43" Vizio TV from WalMart now, via HDMI. I have a 32" 4K Asus at home.

Great for old programmers like me with worn-out eyes. My Intel i5 NUC is about 8 years old.

As an Ubuntu Gnome user I swear by gTile [gnome.org]!

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[caseih]

Have a large 4k visio and it works pretty well as a monitor, but the lag drives me crazy. You can see it moving the mouse across the screen. I've changed to gaming mode but there's still a lot of lag. Visio is still doing some sort of processing as I can see artifacts where its messing with the display. I've tried all the modes that are supposed to disable processing, but it insists on being "smart." So frustrating. Wish you could just buy a dumb screen still. This smart stuff is driving me crazy.

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[SpzToid]

That sounds terrible. My experience doesn't match yours. One thing I can think of is to ensure the HDMI cable is of quality and per specification. That can trip you up otherwise. The HDMI cables have different speed ratings, (or whatever the unit of measurement is).

All my hardware is over 8 years old. I have two PCs attached via a cheap KVM, one is Ubuntu and the other is Windows 11.

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[Big Hairy Gorilla]

You have to adjust the screen dpi or just the system fonts.
I use a 27" 4k monitor for programming, and love that I can on one screen open terminal windows to 6 or more servers simultaneously, legibly read and cut/paste between them ... I find that to be huge productivity boost vs. a laptop screen at 1920x1080. (linux/debian/devuan)

Don't know your IDE or OS, but surely dpi and system fonts can be tweaked on windows or apple.

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[chuckugly]

I use 4K on a 43" panel and it's same DPI as any old school display. Tiling is awesome on this. I would love to have a window manager that basically works like VS code or VS, as I find this much easier to organize.

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[Malay2bowman]

I'm not sure how many people are doing 8K work on an Android device, and even if a tablet could do 8K, the content is going to be awfully tiny. Maybe docking an Android device to a workstation that has an 8K monitor, and the device is powerful enough to handle it, but more importantly there are apps suitable enough for this "real work", it would be practical. But the people doing this are doing this already with Windows, Mac OS, or *nix.

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[MeNeXT]

What came first the chicken or the egg?

If the tablet/phone can control 2 or more monitors then it can keep it's resolution on it's screen and have a different resolution on another monitor. The future that we saw in Scifi is now in our homes. Having a large TV/monitor on our wall with high resolution can allow multiple items to be displayed. News, stocks, weather, recipes, video calls, etc... displayed from your phone or tablet makes a lot of sense to me. Having multiple people displaying on one monitor is

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[bill_mcgonigle]

You know how some people get upset if you move the couch to the other side of the room?

"It's not even the same room!"

Tiling window managers give strong spacial predictability.

If it doesn't make sense to you then it's not for your mode of cognition.

Which is fine.

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[fluffernutter]

Ok that's a fair answer. I have ADHD so I prefer to move a window immediately and unencumbered.

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[kurkosdr]

Person who is happy with a tiling window manager -> person whose entire desktop experience is 4 80x24 terminals, each one occupying 1/4th of the screen.

These are often the same people who throw a hissy fit when source code has lines that are more than 80 characters wide and point to Style Guides people of their ilk wrote (thus forcing everyone else to pretend that the Visual Studio/Eclipse/Netbeans/PyCharm etc editor is an 80-character-wide terminal from the 80s).

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[fluffernutter]

But to do that in kde i just need to open four terminals and drag them to each corner, or use the hotkey to snap them to the corner. Don't need a m for that.

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[AmiMoJo]

It looks like it will have tiling from the very start. The current system for tablets and foldable phones is that you can tile windows, and this is an extension of that.

This is nothing new

[Viol8]

I've got this on my samsung android tablet I bought 5 years ago (albeit a developer option). Whether it was a samsung addition or standard Android I don't know, but why this hasn't been standard on tablets at least - probably not much use on a phone sized screen - beats me.

Re: This is nothing new

[Fortnite_Beast]

Google jumped the shark a few years ago. It's taking Slashdot a long time to realize it. Samsung is driving the real innovation in Android now and has been for years. They have the same business plan as Microsoft web browser. Let Google handle the heavy lift of writing the main app but leverage it in your products for a better and cheaper result than you could produce on your own.

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[jbmartin6]

Same on my Lenovo P12 tablet. I assumed the 'PC mode' on that device was something in Android, now I wonder.

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[codebase7]

It's a standard feature for BlissOS too.

Only downside is that some apps don't play nice being resized. Many do, for example the Amazon Kindle app. But there's always that one app that will assume it's in portrait full screen mode and refuse to work properly if it's dimensions are altered at all. (Games especially. Probably touch coordinate conversion from the screen to what ever internal window getting messed up.)

1980s

[OrangeTide]

Yes, the 1980's were an exciting time to be alive.

"Desktop Mode" has been a thing for a while

[Anaerin]

It's a standard part of Android (albeit locked behind a Developer Mode checkbox in some cases) which in stock Android provides the barest minimum functionality, like no task bar, but can be augmented with apk addons. On many devices (Samsung's DeX, Huawei's MIUI, OnePlus, LG, Motorola) they've upgraded the bare "Desktop Mode" functionality to work over network casting or DP alt mode to make your phone usable as a desktop device with just one cable, supporting Bluetooth keyboards and mice.

Google's Pixel devi

Oh great

[Tough Love]

Oh great, we get to enjoy a new, shitty window manager pulled out of Google's collective ass. Because they, you know, need to reinvent the wheel, but make it square.

for entertainment center pruposes, HDMI multiplexe

[dhizzle]

HDMI hardware multiplexers are a neat addition to put inline with monitor. Then you can force the windowing to happen.