Google brought picture-in-picture support to Android starting with Android 8.0. This lets you, for example, keep watching a YouTube video in a small screen while you navigate away from the YouTube app and open the home screen or other apps.
Up until now, you could move that picture-in-picture window around… but you couldn’t change its size.
Now it looks like you’ll be able to resize picture-in-picture windows when Android 11 arrives later this year (assuming your phone or tablet is updated to the next version of Google’s mobile operating system).
This week Google released Android 11 Developer Preview 4, but at the time the company didn’t have much to say about new features in the latest release.
The folks at xda-developers dug into the latest preview though, and found a bunch of changes from earlier versions of the operating system. For example, there’s support for new icon shapes in the Pixel Themes app, you can enable wireless debugging through a Quick Settings tile, and you can see a number showing how many notifications you have from a specific app in the preview window.
Resizable picture-in-picture windows is another new feature — when you tap outside one of the corners of the window, you’ll be able to drag the window to make it larger or smaller.
It’s just one of a number of changes expected to ship with Android 11 later this year. Others include native support for phones with 90Hz or higher screen refresh rates, new privacy features, smoother scrolling, and notification shade improvements.
You can find some details in the Android developer release notes, but for the most part the changes listed in the developer documentation are, unsurprisingly, aimed at developers rather than end users.
That train episode was ridiculous. In all the best ways.