Paul’s Pixel 10 Diaries: Pixel Fold Multitasking Matters ⭐

We flew back from Mexico last Friday, so last weekend was a familiar mix of being exhausted but wanting to get things done. By the time Saturday wound down, we were both ready to check out a bit, so we queued up some music, turned down the lights, and settled in for the evening. I needed to finish setting up both of the phones I had just gotten, the iPhone 17 Pro Max and the Pixel 10 Pro Fold, but I could only do one at time. So I handed the Fold to my wife, knowing she was interested in using it.

"How do you run two apps side-by-side?" she asked within 30 seconds.

Huh. I knew that you can display the Fold's dock-like Taskbar when using the internal folding display by swiping up from the bottom. But I wasn't sure how to do this most basic of multitasking tasks. Guessing, I suggested that she display one app, display the Taskbar, and then try dragging an icon for another app from the Taskbar upwards. This would either remove the app from the Taskbar or solve the problem.

As it turns out, that works, though it assumes a bit of preparation on your part: Both apps have to be running and/or available from the Taskbar because they were previously pinned there. I didn't think much more about it that night, I was too tired. But when Sunday rolled around, I started poking around the Fold to see what I could find before I actually looked at the documentation.

I found a few things.

From the Desktop on the internal display, you can just swipe up from the bottom and see thumbnails for any running apps, as you might on a phone. As with single-screen Pixel phones, each of the thumbnails features a menu that appears when you tap its name in the upper left.

Among the options it displays is a "Split screen" item that does what you think it does. In fact, this works on single-screen Pixel phones (and on the Fold's external display) too.

But that menu has a single unique option on the Fold's internal display, too: "Change aspect ratio" will open the Settings app and let you change how the selected app displays on that internal display. By default, most (all?) apps display full screen by default. But you can choose the app default, which is likely a phone-shaped aspect ratio, or between 3:2 and half-screen views.

OK, so that is interesting. As interesting, some apps don't support split screen, so some experimentation is required. When I tried to display Chrome and the Google app side-by-side, I was told that one of the apps didn't support side-by-side, for example. But when I tried it again to see if I could figure out which wouldn't work, it just worked. OK.

The divider between the two apps has a handle on it, so you can make one app take up more or less space arbitrarily, though it seems optimized to temporarily display one or the other in 80 or 90 percent of the screen width.

When you display that multitasking screen (by swiping up from the bottom), the context menu that appears on each of the thumbnails in a...