Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

It looks like Android M is taking some baby steps toward addressing our complaints about Android on large-screened tablets. The preview build released yesterday includes a split keyboard for easier thumb typing, but if you dig a little deeper you can also find a "highly experimental" split-screen multitasking mode that suggests that Google is doing more work on the problem behind the scenes.

Enabling this feature is no simple task (and if you do it, we take no responsibility for damage you do to your hardware). Start by flashing your tablet to Android M, and then flash your recovery partition with the latest version of TWRP for the Nexus 9. Boot into recovery, mount Android's System partition, and change the "build.prop" file to indicate that this is a "userdebug" build of M (the process is explained in more detail in this Reddit post). Reboot, ignore any warnings, head into the developer options, and you'll be able to enable multi-window mode.

Google's warning dialog calls this feature "highly experimental," and it's right to do so—even for a deeply hidden feature in an early preview build, it's inconsistent and crashy and mostly unusable except as a proof-of-concept. It's definitely not as polished as Samsung's version of the same feature, which it's been shipping in its Android phones and tablets for a couple of years now.

Google's version of the feature divides your tablet's screen into quadrants. You can run two apps side-by-side or stacked on top of each other by splitting the screen down the middle; three apps with one app on half the screen and two apps on the other half; or four apps by putting one in each quadrant.

The Recents screen is used to choose which apps go where and how much screen space they take up. Tap the icon on each app's card and the menu lets you pick where to put the app.

On the Nexus 9 Google loaned us at I/O, performance and stability were all over the place. Sometimes the apps would become unresponsive. Sometimes they would be responsive to input but they wouldn't load all the way, or they would fail to load entirely. It's not a feature you actually want to use, which is probably why you need to modify system files to access it in the first place. But it's an interesting look at where Google is headed with Android tablets, and perhaps a small admission that the experience isn't as good as it should be.

Listing image by Andrew Cunningham