Android 16 tablets will be able to run up to three apps on one screen

Multitasking on Android has been around for several years, but there have been no changes in this direction for a long time: smartphones and tablets running the original OS support running only two applications at the same time—additional capabilities are sometimes offered by interface shells. But with Android 16, it looks like the number of simultaneous apps will be increased to three.

Image source: google.com

Running two applications on one screen is convenient and useful for devices of almost any size, and with a large display diagonal it can be comfortable to work with three applications at once. It is offered by the Samsung One UI shell, “PC Mode” with floating windows on Lenovo devices, as well as the Open Canvas function on OnePlus gadgets. Journalists from the Android Authority resource found something similar in the original preliminary version of Android 16 from Google itself.

Android 16 DP2 includes a “flexible” multitasking system that will support running up to three applications simultaneously. It doesn’t work in the preview version of the system yet, but in one of the demos users are asked to add a third application in split-screen mode to the already running first two – the scheme is similar to Open Canvas. There has been no official confirmation of this function from Google yet, but the demonstration suggests that working on tablets with “pure” Android, and then on other OS implementations, will become a little more convenient.