The Samsung Galaxy Note 8 has just been released and it brings a ton of new features. Some of these features, as always, are exclusive to the Note series and are not even available on other flagship devices. While the Note 8’s hardware features (e.g. S Pen) probably can’t be ported to other Android devices, some software features can. One of my favorite software features that come with the Note 8 is “App Pair”. It gives users the ability to launch two apps simultaneously in split-screen mode via a single app shortcut. I really like this feature because it will make multitasking on the Note 8 really intuitive and easy. I love this feature so much that I figured out how to implement it on my own Android device. If you want to use this feature on your Android device, How to get Note 8’s App Pair Feature on Any Android Device:
Note: Since the split screen feature was introduced in AnDroid OS with Nougat update (Android 7.0), your device must be running on that particular Android OS version for this method to work.
Get Note 8’s App Pair Feature on Any Android Device
We will have to use a third party app as you know this feature is not natively available on Android. The methodology is very simple, so let’s move on.
1. Third party app that we will be using today Called “Displays – Multi Window Manager”. It is a free application and you can install it by clicking on it. Play Store link.
2. Now, before using this, we will need to grant accessibility access by going to the Settings page. To do this, go to: Settings-> Accessibility and scroll down to find “Screens”. Tap on it and enable it.
3. Now start the application. The interface of the app is pretty straight forward. You will see two buttons that will let you add apps A button to open in split screen mode and create shortcuts for them.
4. Tap the “+” button and select the app you want. Do this for both apps.
5. Name your shortcut by typing it in the “Shortcut name” field and press “Create Shortcut” button to create your shortcut.
6. As soon as you press the button, an icon will be placed on your home screen. You can create as many shortcuts as you want.. Again, icon will stay the same for all shortcuts you create, the only way to distinguish between them is their name. So be careful when naming shortcuts.
7. As you can see from the pictures above, I created four different split screen shortcuts, I can tap any of them to launch apps in split screen mode. Shortcuts work perfectly. See pictures below for confirmation.
SEE ALSO: How to Get iOS 11 Like Control Center on Any Android Device
Launch Apps with a Shortcut in Split Screen Windows
As you can see the method is very easy and you can start creating your own App Pair right away. The app works flawlessly and hasn’t failed me once. The only thing you have to keep in mind is the fact that some apps do not support the split screen feature. For example, apps like Amazon Kindle and Uber do not support it. If you create a shortcut using these apps, when you tap on it, you’ll get a pop-up notification that the included apps don’t support it. Other than that, there is no problem here. What makes it even better is that the app is completely free to use this too without any ads.
So what are you waiting for, start using the “App Pair” feature of Galaxy Note 8 on your Android device and create your own custom split screen shortcuts. If you want to see any other Note 8 features that will be ported to your device, drop them in the comment section below. We will do our best to cover them in our upcoming articles.
