Google to roll out multitasking on Android tablets

Android smartphones and tablets already offer a great multitasking experience, and Google continues to enhance it further by adding a 90:10 split-screen mode feature. This will make usage more flexible and easier to multitask simultaneously on small-screen devices.

Multitasking on Android tablets needs improvement. However, Google is aware of this and may introduce a feature to bubble apps, allowing users to switch between multiple applications more easily.

Reports of Google working on a ‘bubble anything’ feature emerged in October last year, with the feature hidden in the Android 15 QPR1 Beta 2. At the time, it seemed apparent that the company would officially release this feature with Android 16, but ultimately, that did not occur.

Now, Android Authority’s Mishaal Rahman has discovered more references to this feature in the latest Android Canary 2510 release, though with some significant adjustments. Instead of being able to bubble anything, code snippets suggest that Google will let you bubble Android apps on tablets by dragging an app’s icon from one of the bottom corners of the screen.

A tutorial will pop up explaining how the new bubble works as the user performs the gestures for the first time. The tutorial will explain to users how an app can be drawn to the bottom corners to make it float, with an animation showing how to create a bubble from the taskbar using a drag gesture, according to code strings.

The report also claims that a user can launch any Android app in a floating bubble.

Android’s existing conversation bubbling feature, which allows users to freely move and access chats while using other apps, is currently limited to phones. Expanding this capability to Android tablets would be a logical and natural progression.

There is also a high chance that the feature could be discarded. But with a full tutorial complete with animations now in place, that seems unlikely.

Google may unveil the ability to bubble Android apps on tablets with Android 16’s first Quarterly Platform Release in 2026. If not, we might wait until the Android 17 release to use this feature on tablets.