It’s about Android 15’s desktop mode

Arriving with Android tablets doubly powerful, people have desperately been trying to turn their tab as a single-PC replacement for any trip outside of the home (a dream that’s been foiled by stock Android still sagging far behind any desktop operating systems as far as multitasking and windowing mentality is concerned – something Goog is thankfully on to changing, even with Android 15 right now).

Google doesn’t talk about what, exactly, this new feature looks like, but if you’re developing alongside Android 15 as we have with our Voyager tablets, you can give the original version of Android’s desktop mode a beauty upgrade by leveraging a series of new windowing options.

The underlying desktop mode is a fairly dull feature, first cooked up when Goog designers first dreamed up the concept of detachable tablet/desktop use, and it should have been obvious from the outset of Android tablets that display connectivity was only the first step. That it took a decade before such an option would arrive on any desperate tab maker could tell anyone just what Google thought of the idea, even though third-parties found a way around the problem.

The idea, however, never took off – a partially easy problem to understand, as the original Android desktop mode was a fairly half-baked beast, simply turning your phone into a glorified tablet within an absurdly oversized window one could pin to a separate display. It died a quiet death some years back, but Goog secretly rewrote Android desktop mode this year to step up its windowing game and, consequently, you can now use it by of itself, merely plug tab.

We discovered that Android 15’s hidden desktop mode can actually run on-device on tablets.

You can send apps to the desktop mode launcher via the new ‘desktop’ button in the recents screen.

You’re in a kind of launcher from which you can transparently launch one or more apps into freeform windows that you can resize and snap to the sides, if you like.

As an aside, Android had originally included a desktop mode – in theory, anyway – with the release of Android 10 in 2019. In practice, though, it was bare bones: you could launch individual apps into freeform windows, but you couldn’t do many things that the average desktop user expects, such as snap windows to the sides or minimise them to the taskbar. The desktop mode was only included as a way to allow developers to test their apps on multiple screens; it was never really meant for users to be activating it, which is why it was hidden away behind a developer option.

However, beginning late in 2022, Google has been making updates to Android’s built-in desktop mode in an effort to make it much more usable. The majority of these changes were released earlier this year as part of the Android 15 release. They include proper title bars, window snapping, hover support, resizeable windows, and so forth. These changes can be seen in this demonstration of Android 15’s desktop mode video below.

(Further evidence of this incongruity: although Google finally enabled the Pixel to drive an external display with the Pixel 8 software update in June 2024 – what in Android idle terms is considered a ‘Pixel Feature Drop’ – many observers assumed Google was gearing up Android’s desktop mode to top Samsung DeX on an external monitor connected to a Galaxy phone.) However, DeX does more than run on Galaxy phones hooked up to an external screen: DeX also runs natively on a Galaxy slate.

Google’s own tablet, the Pixel Tablet, exists, and rumours for its follow-up are right around the corner. It would be a brilliant move for Android’s reimagined desktop mode to not only work on phones paired with external displays attached via USB-C but to also work on tablets with large enough screens, so I wasn’t surprised when I was able to run the new desktop mode locally.

The youtube screenshot illustrates that a new “desktop” button will show up by tapping the “Menu” button in the recents screen, and the app will be launched in a freeform window in Android’s desktopmode environment by tapping the “desktop” button again – here, the window can be moved to anywhere and snapped to the side of the windows, or even resized, minimised, maximiscied or another apps can be joined on the windows.

When the desktop mode is enabled and you back out to the home screen, you can return to the deck by tapping the ‘desktop’ card in the recents screen, or by opening an app, expanding its window caption, then tapping the button to launch it in any freeform window.

So, it looks as though Google is going to do the same thing in regards to the ‘New Samsung DeX’ experience you get on Galaxy tablets. New DeX is just a multitasking-focused mode of the home screen that works with freeform windows. It has a taskbar, an app drawer, and all of your home screen app icons and widgets, but it’s not an alternate environment — there’s still just a home screen ‘layer’ with all your stuff running underneath it. Android’s version doesn’t ever sync this home screen, and neither does New DeX right now, but as this feature is developed further, it’s possible that could change.

I enabled it on my latest Android 15 Beta 4.1 release on my Pixel, but as often is the case when a third-party company enables a feature pre-release, I have no idea when Google will actually release it. It could be that they never release this new experience for desktop, because they could decide to change priorities before actual release. We’ll search for any new developments, and mention them as we see them.