If you missed the deluge of news last week, Google has unveiled the first developer preview of Android 12 and we & # 39; re very excited about all the changes we & # 39; ve found so far. One of the changes we heard about before the release was a feature called App Pairs. Through our own resources and code analysis of Android 12 Developer Preview 1, we can confirm that the feature has been developed. We even managed to play around with it in the unfinished state.
As a background, App Pairs is a new feature developed for Android 12, which allows you to create multiple apps to launch in a split screen view at the same time. This application pair then serves as one task rather than two, making it easy to reload both apps in a split screen view after entering the recent overview of the apps. You’ll find a similar feature in Samsung’s Android software (it debuts on the Galaxy Note 8) and on Microsoft’s dual-screen Surface Duo, but Google’s version of the software should be accessible to all devices using Android 12, provided it the stable release.
Using a hidden tracking command, we managed to play around a bit with the App Pairs feature, but it still has a long way to go before it can be used. While the two apps are treated as a single task, they are not merged in the recent apps review. There is (as far as we can see) no way to create a shortcut on the home screen to launch an app pair, but oddly enough, the application of one of the two apps in the pair will restart the app pair.
Although third-party alternatives such as developer Francisco Barroso’s “Split Screen Launcher” currently offer an excellent user interface, they rely on Android’s built-in APIs to start activities manually in split-screen mode one by one. In addition, the apps are not grouped together, so they are still treated as two separate tasks. This means that the application pair not only starts slowly, but that the activities need to be refreshed when it starts again. A Google-made first-party implementation for all Android 12 devices would definitely be appreciated.
By comparison, here’s a video showing how my device launches an application pair created by the “Split Screen Launcher” application:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVNqUAyKFC's
And here’s a video showing how my device launches an application pair created by Android 12’s App Pairs feature:
How to make app pairs in Android 12 developer preview 1
If you want to create an application pair yourself, you need to download and install the first Android 12 Developer Preview. Then enter ADB tracking into a terminal or command prompt on your computer and execute the following command:
dumpsys activity service SystemUIService WMShell pair {taskId1} {taskId2}where {taskId1} and {taskId2} are the task IDs of the two programs you want to group. You can find taskIds from performing ‘dumpsys activity’. After completing this task, it will create a new task for the application pair. If you want to disconnect these programs, you can perform this command:
dumpsys activity service SystemUIService WMShell unpair {taskId}The proposed image is merely a model and is not representative of what App Pairs might look like in Android 12.