In case you missed the deluge of news last week, Google launched the first Developer Preview of Android 12, and we are very excited about all the changes we have encountered so far. One of the changes we heard about before the launch was a feature called App Pairs. Through our own sources and code analysis for Android 12 Developer Preview 1, we can confirm that the feature is really under development. We even managed to play with him in his unfinished state.
For the background, App Pairs is a new feature under development for Android 12 that will allow you to create a pair of apps to start showing in split screen simultaneously. This pair of applications acts as one task instead of two, making it easier to relaunch both applications in split screen after entering the overview of recent applications. You’ll find a similar feature in Samsung’s Android software (debuted on the Galaxy Note 8) and on Microsoft’s dual-screen Surface Duo, but the Google software version must be accessible to all devices running Android 12, as long as it’s compatible with the stable version.
Using a hidden shell command, we managed to play around with the App Pairs feature for a while, but we still have a long way to go before it is usable. On the one hand, although the two applications are treated as a single task, they are not really grouped together in the overview of recent applications. There is still no way (as far as we can tell) to create a shortcut to the home screen to launch a pair of applications, but interestingly, starting either of the two applications in the pair will actually restart the application pair.
Although third-party alternatives, such as the “Split Screen Launcher” by developer Francisco Barroso currently provide a superior UI, they rely on integrated Android APIs to manually start activities in split-screen mode, one by one. In addition, applications are not grouped, so they are still treated as two separate tasks. This means that the application pair is not only a little slow to start, but requires activities to be updated if they are restarted. An original Google implementation for all Android 12 devices is sure to be appreciated.
For comparison, here is a video showing my device launching a pair of apps created by the “Split Screen Launcher” app:
And here’s a video that shows my device starting up a pair of apps created by the App Pairs feature of Android 12:
How to make pairs of apps on Android 12 Developer Preview 1
If you want to try to create a couple of applications yourself, you will need to download and install the first Android 12 Developer Preview. Then, insert ADB shell into a terminal or command prompt on your PC and run the following shell command:
dumpsys activity service SystemUIService WMShell pair {taskId1} {taskId2}where {taskId1} and {taskId2} are the task IDs for the two applications you want to group. You can find taskIds in the “dumpsys activity” output. After executing this command, it will create a new task for the application pair. If you want to unpair these applications, you can run this command:
dumpsys activity service SystemUIService WMShell unpair {taskId}The featured image is simply a mockup and does not represent the appearance of the pairs of applications on Android 12.