Photo-in-picture was one of the most advanced features of Android 8.0 Oreo, and even today it is still one of the biggest additions made to Android in recent times. If you do not know it, you can watch videos that are currently playing from your browser or other applications while doing something else. It has since become the most important feature for programs like YouTube, which allows you to keep watching videos while using other programs. But since its launch in 2017, it hasn’t really gotten any new refinements or improvements, but that may change now that Android 12 is around the corner.
Here it’s in action. Feat. @ Dave2D pic.twitter.com/Im6u0QOFdt
– Mishaal Rahman (@MishaalRahman) 18 February 2021
Our deep dive into Android 12’s first developer preview revealed that Google has added extra features for the photo-in-picture feature in Android 12, with two new enhancements. The first of these is to resize a pinch-to-resize size, which almost looks like it: with two fingers you can resize the window, making it larger or smaller if necessary. The second is stashing, which allows you to hide a window without closing it completely by stitching it to the side. None of these features are enabled by default, which is not really a surprise as both features are currently very rough.
There are many scenarios where you want to use both of these features, so it’s definitely useful for Google to add it to Android 12. For example, you’ll see something and make the video feed bigger to see something up close, or maybe hear you’re the sound of a video, but the floating window bothers what you’re doing in another app, so you’re just hiding it.
At the moment, however, it’s pretty good, but that’s to be expected, since we’re using a very early version of this operating system. Once Android 12 expires over the next few months, we should be able to see it work better and smoother, or be scrapped altogether.