Android12 just reinvented picture-in-picture on the phone - here's your first look

Android12 just reinvented picture-in-picture on the phone - here's your first look

Google's mobile operating system's picture-in-picture feature is likely to be added in Android 12.

XDA sneaked into the first developer preview of Android 12 and discovered that Google appears to be making two major improvements to the picture-in-picture feature.

First introduced in Android 8.0 Oreo, Picture-in-Picture allows users to continue watching a video playing from a browser or supported app while doing other things such as sending messages or browsing social media.

This feature is super useful but has remained largely untouched since 2017, but that's about to change with these two features being added in the upcoming Android 12.

The window resize, called Pinch to Resize, will, as the name implies, allow users to resize the picture-in-picture window in Android 12. This is useful when you want to increase the window size to see something more closely or reduce the window size if it gets in the way of using other apps.

Hiding a window without closing it completely (stash) allows you to put away a PiP window without actually closing it. This feature is ideal when you want to devote the entire screen of the device to something for a few minutes, or when you are listening to a video and only want to hear the audio for a few moments.

XDA reports that both features are currently in a rather rough state and are disabled by default. These features are currently being demonstrated on the Developer Preview version of the OS, so hopefully the glitches will be ironed out by the time Android 12 launches to the public.

Nothing has been confirmed yet, but based on the release schedule so far, Android 12 is expected to launch around September of this year.

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