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 side-by-side app configuration now displays a “Save app pair” option whose function isn’t immediately obvious. But it created a Desktop shortcut for the pair so you can launch both together, which is nice.

As I stepped through all this, it occurred to me that the internal display isn’t using the Desktop Mode that’s hiding inside Android 16. Instead, this is an interim, tablet-like experience that’s more like a standard single-screen Pixel phone, but with a wider aspect ratio. That is, you don’t see floating windows, you can just snap two apps side-by-side. This is the most useful and common configuration after just using a single app, so it makes sense.

In fact, this made me realize that the aspect ratio choices you see when you select the “Change aspect ratio” option are really about getting a poorly-written app to display correctly on the bigger internal display. Many or maybe even most apps are likely fine. But if you have one that just looks off, perhaps isn’t autoflowing well to fill the full display, you can just change the way it displays when launched normally. You’ll get black bars on either side, but it will work.

I did this temporarily with Maps just to see what it looked like, using a 3:2 aspect ratio. There are hints on-screen that you can double-tap one of those black bars on the side to move the app to one side of the screen. And then a pop-up noting that you can access settings to change how the app displays. No user left behind, I guess. But also no way to arbitrarily resize an app that is not taking up the full display. Simplicity over complexity, in that case. That makes sense, too. (Obviously, Maps works fine full-screen, this was just a test.)

One could, of course, enable Desktop Mode. But I will use this as God (or at least Google) intended for now. That one could use any Pixel phone this way within the confines of the smaller, taller aspect ratio display is a curiosity, mostly, I would never typically multitask that way on a phone. But on the internal display of the Fold, doing so is more natural and more elegant.

Google also built in some interesting features for those just using a single app at a time. This isn’t a complete list, of course, but here are a few I’ve already noticed.

The most common and obvious is that apps with lots of sub-screens can simply display in a side-by-side view. Settings, for example, displays the normal list of top-level items on the left half of the screen and then whatever sub-screen you’ve selected on the right. On a phone, you go in/out, in/out one by one, but on the Fold, you can see both together. Ditto for the notification shade.

If you use the Camera app with the Fold when it’s folded and works like a typical smartphone, everything is normal, and works as it does on other Pixels. But if you do so from the internal folding display, there’s an onscreen button for enabling a Dual Screen Preview mode or Made You Look, a feature aimed at babies and small children.

Dual Screen Preview displays the view through the Camera viewfinder on both displays. So the subject can see it too. This is probably most useful for framing a shot, enabling the timer, and then triggering the shot with enough time for you to jump into the scene being shot, but I suppose there are other use cases too. (There is also a dedicated Rear Camera Selfie mode as the rear cameras are of higher quality than either selfie camera.)

There is also a nice Instant View toggle button in the Camera app when using the internal display that lets you view the photos you’ve taken side-by-side with the viewfinder. This, too, can be useful since you can see whether the shot you just took is suitable and thus may not need to take a backup shot.

Since I’m on the Camera app, I will also point out that the Fold’s unique orientation capabilities means that you can sit in the device down on a flat surface in an L-shaped (laptop-like) way that puts the viewfinder on the top (vertical) half and the camera controls on the bottom (flat half). This can be useful for setting up a selfie (or just a photo you’ll jump into with a timer) when you don’t have a tripod with you. It’s obviously a nice and stable way to take a photo.

You might also use this mode in a video call or while watching a movie. In fact, one of the oddities of the Fold is that most (16:9 or similar) videos will naturally fill about half the device’s internal display. This means that watching most videos on the internal display is little different from watching them on the external display from a size perspective. But of course you can also have two apps on the internal display. Or use the top half of the screen in that L-shaped configuration so that it sits there without needing a kickstand or whatever.

In fact, I see now that Google calls this L-shaped, laptop-like mode Tabletop mode, which makes sense. And well-written apps like Camera and YouTube know how to optimize for it.

I think it’s a good sign that I just stumbled into it rather than needing to read about it first. This was always the problem with the full-screen interfaces in Windows 8, they weren’t discoverable. But so far, it feels like the changes you get with the folding display on this device are largely obvious.

It’s also worth comparing this to what Apple is doing in iPadOS 26 with the iPad. I’ve praised that work, and in many ways, it’s more versatile in that you get an arbitrary number of floating apps if you want that. But that assumes you’re not using the iPad in Full Screen Apps mode. What iPadOS 26 doesn’t support is a Full Screen Apps mode that also offers two side-by-side apps (via features like Split View and Slide Over). You have to use Windowed Apps or Stage Manager to get that. (I’m curious now to see whether Apple adds a Split View capability for Full Screen Apps.) You know, unless I’m missing something.

More soon.