With the launch of the second developer preview of Android back in May, Google added a surprising and useful feature to the Overview interface. You could highlight and copy text and also make use of Android's smart text selection functionality. Optical character recognition (OCR) capabilities meant you could also pull text from images.

Even more interesting was that you could select and copy images in the same way, including those from apps that don't allow media to be shared (such as Instagram and Snapchat). Sadly, in DP4 this feature is no longer present.

It was great for copying text between apps and grabbing otherwise restricted photos, but for some reason, Google has decided to get rid of it with the third Android P beta. It may be that the ability to copy images from any app led to complaints from developers who prohibit it, leading Google to remove it altogether. Or it could be that the feature isn't quite ready for primetime — it certainly didn't always work consistently. If that's the case, we may well see it return in a more polished form with a future release. Only time will tell, but since this is now a near-final version of Android P, we probably won't see it anytime soon.