Android N for phones is promising, but not for the faint of heart

Android N for phones is promising, but not for the faint of heart

Android N's multi-window mode is a big deal. It's one of those features that makes more sense on bigger screens, but the whole thing feels surprisingly elegant even on smaller devices like the 5X. Tapping the Recent Apps button brings up a familiar stack of cards, but grabbing one and dragging it to the top of the resizes the app window to half its normal height, leaving the app switcher active in the bottom pane. Tap another app et voilà, you're split-screen multitasking on an Android phone. Even third-party apps -- Twitter, Spotify, Weather Underground -- that haven't been reconfigured to work in split-screen usually work as intended. (Although the system does throw up a warning just in case things are a little wonky). There's a catch, though! While you can drag the divider to peek at more information in either app window, you can't resize those windows all willy-nilly. The best you can do is make one of the apps use two-thirds of the screen. Curiously, this limited resizing works when the phone is vertical -- resizing in either orientation works fine on tablets.

Read full article from Android N for phones is promising, but not for the faint of heart