Samsung has always been a step ahead of Google when it comes to great innovations on top of the stock Android operating system. Samsung introduced the multi-window mode in its Galaxy Note features long before Google made it a feature available in the Android Nougat version. The Galaxy Note’s larger screen along with the S Pen made the multi window aspect apt for many users. This time as well, Samsung has introduced a feature with its Galaxy Note 8, which, even the Android 8.0 Oreo stock platform does not allow.
What is the new feature?
With the latest Galaxy Note 8, Samsung has introduced a new feature which can be immensely helpful to some people.
The phablet allows people to pair two apps together and create a shortcut, through which both apps can be opened at once. For instance, people can pair internet browser and YouTube together as a shortcut. When this shortcut is selected, a Split Screen view of YouTube will be opened alongside the split screen view of the web browser.
This feature is known as App Pairing and is not available on the stock Android platform. This innovative functionality allows users to open two apps at the same time in the multi-screen view, without having to fumble and open one app, then go ahead and open the other one, and finally splitting the screen to view both the applications together. Thus, Samsung as managed to reduce the functionality from a three steps process to a single step one.
This may make one wonder why Google did not think of this one while making the Android Nougat OS, where it introduced the split screen feature. Google has introduced this feature the same even in the Android 8.0 Oreo OS that was released in August this year.
It shows that Samsung puts in a lot of thought to make the Android OS on its phones much better than the stock Android platform.
However, all Android Nougat and above devices can implement this app pair functionality quite easily, even though it is available only in Galaxy Note 8 at the time being.
How to add the App Pair in any Android device
To incorporate the App Pair functionality in any Android handset, users will need to download an app available for $0.99 from Google Play.
The app is named Split-Screen Creator. Once installed, users can use this app to pair two apps together and open the same in multi-screen windowed mode. Since it involves multi-window functionality, the app will only work on handsets running Android 7.0 Nougat or above.
