Android 7.0 Nougat Review Do more on your gigantic smartphone

In Nougat, Android apps gain the ability to be resized on the fly and placed in windows, which is a huge change for the formerly one-app-at-a-time operating system. Combined with some window management, this enables several features across the Android ecosystem: picture-in-picture in Android TV, a still-hidden floating window mode (for... desktops an
d laptops?), Android apps on Chrome OS, and split screen apps on phones and tablets. That's right—four years behind Windows tablets, three years behind Samsung devices, and one year behind iOS, Android tablets are finally getting split screen.
On phones and tablets, there are three ways to start split screen mode.

1. Long press on the Recent Apps button from inside an app.
2. Open Recent Apps, long press on a thumbnail, and drag it to the top or right side of the screen.
3. Swipe up on the Recent Apps menu. (You have to enable this one in the System UI tuner.)

All of these are easy enough to remember once you somehow find out about them, but hiding everything behind a long press or gesture means novices will have a hard time stumbling across them.
Split screen mode cuts the screen in half, and the current app moves to the top half of the screen in portrait mode or the left half in landscape. The Recent Apps button gets cut in half, too, changing from a single rectangle to two rectangles next to each other. In between the apps is a black bar which you can drag to the one-third, one-half, and two-thirds positions. You can also drag the bar all the way to the edge of the screen to exit split screen mode. Resizing doesn't give you a live preview. While dragging the resize bar, the apps usually stay their original shape. When you release the bar, the apps will quickly snap to their new dimensions.
In the split screen system, there is a bias toward the top (or left) app—this app is basically permanent, and anything you do will involve changing the bottom (or right) window. Recent apps always open in the bottom (or right) window, and there's no way to make the apps swap sides. Since there's no way to swap out the top for another app, the only way to change it is to completely leave split screen mode, open a new app, and start split screen mode again.
If you press the home button, both apps will slide out of the way to reveal the full-screen home screen. The bottom app actually closes, while the top/left app is minimized to a tiny sliver on the side of the screen. Tapping on an app will reopen split screen mode, with the top/left app returning and the new app in the bottom/right. The minimized app on the home screen works better in landscape than in portrait—there's nothing in landscape, so it looks fine, but in portrait, it gets lost under the status bar. Most of the time it doesn't even look like a minimized app, and your status bar is just a different color. You can't tap on the minimized app or anything though; it's just meant as a visual aid to remind you you're in split screen mode.
The bias toward the top/left app just seems arbitrary. Google missed a lot of potential when it comes to dragging thumbnails out of the Recent Apps view and into split screen. It would make more sense to be able to drag an app thumbnail out of Recent Apps and into whichever half of the screen you want it to open in (ditto for home screen icons). But you can't do that. To start split screen mode, you can only drag an app to the top/left side, never the bottom/right side. Once you're in split screen mode, dragging out of Recent Apps doesn't work anymore.
More could have been done with the Recent Apps button in split screen, too. Why not have Recent Apps open in the side you tapped on last, rather than always on the bottom/right? Or maybe put two Recent Apps buttons in the system bar in split screen mode—one for each side.
Another oddity: you can be on the home screen with the split screen mode active, but you can't start split screen from the home screen. The home screen is the only screen in the OS where long pressing on the Recent Apps button doesn't do anything. Even a message like "You can't open split screen here" would be preferable to nothing. Users are accustomed to launching apps from the home screen, so there should be a way to launch apps into split screen mode from the home screen.
Sometimes you'll want to open two instances of the same app side-by-side—it might be useful to see two webpages at once, or two different chats from the same service, or maybe two Slack channels. Whether or not you can do this depends on the app. Chrome seems to be the only app that really supports being opened twice: just enter split screen mode, press Chrome's menu button, and pick "Move to other window." Chrome then takes over both sides of the screen.
For other apps, the general rule seems to be "if it makes more than one thumbnail in Recent Apps, you open it twice in split screen." Just pick one thumbnail, trigger split screen, and then pick the other. This feels more like a trick than an intended feature though. Obvious things like tapping on a home screen icon, triggering split screen, and going back to the home screen to tap on the same icon again just don't work. You're kicked back out to Recent Apps.
Split screen works on phone and tablets, but tablets in particular really benefit from the new feature. Not a lot of tablet-formatted Android apps out there yet, and it all starts at the top with Google. Even when you get a "tablet aware" layout from Google, the company still insists on building apps that "gracefully" expand to fill a tablet screen, which never results in something that feels significantly more powerful or versatile on a tablet compared to a phone. A single phone app filling a tablet screen is usually clunky, but two phone apps side-by-side on a tablet isn't too bad. When you cut a tablet screen in half, you end up with two vertical chunks of screen that are relatively phone-shaped, so phone-centric apps suddenly feel a little less ridiculous. Android tablets still aren't great, but they suck a little less thanks to Nougat
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