The (updated) history of Android (Ars Technica) [LWN.net]

Ars Technica covers the history of Android from version 0.5 to 7.0 "Nougat". "One of the most interesting additions to Nougat is a revamp of the app framework to allow for resizable apps. This allowed Google to implement split screen on phones and tablets, picture-in-picture on Android TV, and a mysterious floating windowed mode. We've been able to access the floating window mode with some software trickery, but we've yet to see Google use it in an actual product. Is it being aimed at desktop computing?"

to post comments

The (updated) history of Android (Ars Technica)

Posted Nov 1, 2016 7:21 UTC (Tue) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link] (3 responses)

My guess would be the windowed mode is for the grand unified future of Chrome OS meets Android, and perhaps for other options (such as presumably unsupported containers running Android on other OSes).

The (updated) history of Android (Ars Technica)

Posted Nov 1, 2016 12:47 UTC (Tue) by karim (subscriber, #114) [Link] (1 responses)

It might also just be a pragmatic choice. I mean, several devices have had the ability to run apps side-by-side and it was at least my personal expectation that Google would eventually want to "own" this feature and not let others add it on a per-device basis. Now, if you're a sw developer and you're about to add support to have apps sit side-by-side in Android, it might just be that it's simpler to take care of the more general cases (i.e. floating windows) right away instead of having to possibly revisit the entire stack one more time when that other case becomes an actual feature request, especially if the math being added is fairly close. But that's just me speculating, I have no proof either way.

The (updated) history of Android (Ars Technica)

Posted Nov 1, 2016 14:38 UTC (Tue) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link]

There are already devices that support floating windows - e.g. some Sony Xperia phones have a "Small Apps" feature, where you can press a button on the recent apps screen to open a calculator, timer, web browser, Gmail, any desktop widget, etc, in little windows that display on top of everything else and can be moved and resized. I'm not sure it's a hugely popular feature, but maybe some people like it, and it's nicer if that kind of functionality is supported and maintained by Google rather than in vendor-specific forks.

The (updated) history of Android (Ars Technica)

Posted Nov 2, 2016 7:31 UTC (Wed) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

> My guess would be the windowed mode is for the grand unified future of Chrome OS meets Android,

Ars Technica sentence right after the one quoted above:
> Android apps can run on some Chromebooks now,

From this other article: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/05/the-play-store-com...
> Phone apps are a disaster on tablets, because they stretch the app to fill the screen. On desktops, though, when you can have everything in a floating window, a phone-sized phone app isn't so bad.