Paul’s Pixel 10 Diaries: Desktop Mode ⭐

I’ve been waiting for years for mobile device platforms—Android, iPhone, and iPad, mostly, but also Chrome OS—to mature into capable general-purpose personal computing platforms that can be used like Windows or the Mac, ideally in a laptop form factor. Until this year, waiting has been the key word in that sentence: Google has gone back and forth on the way forward for laptop form factor devices more times than I can count, and Apple had refused to realize Steve Jobs’ vision for the iPad as the ultimate post-PC device, in part to protect Mac sales.

But now, everything is different. Google confirmed that it will use Android as the underlying OS in Chrome OS, and Android 16 ships with a hidden Desktop Mode thanks to a partnership with Samsung. And Apple, seemingly out of the blue, and possibly to get us all to stop talking about how terrible Apple Intelligence is, suddenly unleashed the productivity potential of every iPad with iPadOS 26.

When it comes to Pixel, I have the three Pixel 10 series phones on loan from Google. I’ve completed the reviews, but I have other write-ups to finish, and then when we get home to Pennsylvania, I have some decisions to make. Including whether to get a Pixel 10 Fold, which might be a nice centerpiece for an all-in-one hybrid system that is a phone, a small tablet, and, when tethered to a USB-C dock, keyboard, mouse, and display, a mini Android-based PC as well.

I’m still mulling over whether to do that, and, if so, how do that. But in the meantime, I do have those three Pixel 10 series phones. Which means I can experiment with Desktop Mode and see where things are at.

Hands-On with Desktop Mode

Desktop Mode is hidden inside Android 16 with QPR1, which means it shipped with the Pixel 10 series phones in late August. It’s based on Samsung DeX, which makes sense given the maturity of that product. And it replaces the previous experience of connecting a (non-Samsung) Android phone to an external display and/or USB-C docking hub.

That is, if you connect a Pixel 10 series phone directly to an external display, the new Desktop Mode appears instead of the old screen mirroring display. Desktop Mode also appears when you connect a Pixel 10 series phone to a USB-C hub with an attached display, but in this case you can use additional peripherals like a keyboard, mouse, and storage.

It’s pretty well done, but it’s also incomplete and buggy, with lots of display wonkiness. It also resets your display timeout from whatever you customized it to be to just 30 seconds, which was frustrating until I reverted it to my preferred setting. And there’s no way to take a screenshot of the desktop that I can find, which is why I have photos here instead.

But the icons you place in the Dock on the phone are replicated in the Taskbar on the desktop display and the phone’s wallpaper appears in the background. You can pull down at the top of the display to access the Quick settings titles and notifications shade. And there are persistent navigation controls (Back, Home, and App buttons, the latter of which works like “Show desktop” here) on the far right of the Taskbar for some reason.

By default, each app runs in a window that you can then resize or maximize.

There’s also a full-screen mode for apps that I later figured out you can access via a little app menu in the top-left of the window.

When in full-screen, you can use a gesture bar-like bar at the top to pull the app out of full-screen, which is logical enough. And the Taskbar disappears, of course, though you can mouse down to the bottom of the display to see it temporarily.

Most of the interactions will be familiar. You can switch between running apps by typing Alt + Tab and open the All Apps menu by tapping the Start button, for example.

But there are weird missing bits, too. There’s no notion of right-click that I can trigger anywhere, but even a long-click (to simulate a long-press) doesn’t work to bring up, say, a menu on the Desktop or Taskbar. This is something the iPad does, and it’s what I expect and want.

I am fascinated that you can run mobile games full-screen on the connected display, though I guess that makes sense; for some reason, I expected that to happen on the phone display.

Aside from basic OS capabilities, the other big question here is whether the Android app ecosystem is mature enough to support this use case. Or, in the future some “pure” Android laptop and/or an Android-based Chromebook. And that’s mixed, frankly. Google has spent years asking and begging developers to support bigger displays thanks to the rise of Android tablets, Chromebooks, and foldables. But Apple has had much more success with this on the iPad.

I use Brave, of course, but it displays the mobile versions of websites by default. You can enable desktop view on a site-by-site basis, which is a hassle. Or you can configure the browser to always use desktop view, which I don’t necessarily want when using the phone normally. A better option would be to automatically use mobile view on the phone and desktop view on the external display, but I don’t see that and I’m not sure who is to blame, Google or Brave. (Brave does have a nice option for enabling multiple browser windows, which is useful in Desktop Mode.)

Looking at Chrome, I see the same interface and options for displaying mobile/desktop views, so I assume Brave just took what it could from Chromium. But this is the type of ecosystem issue that still dogs Android a bit. Details matter, etc.

Thinking about what I would need to get work done, I know of good Markdown editors on the iPad, including my favorite, iA Writer. But there’s nothing like that on Android, so I would need to research alternatives. That’s a Paul problem, obviously, and there are Microsoft Word, Google Docs, and other writing solutions. But Word is terrible: It displays a phone UI even in Desktop Mode, and round and round we go.

Here, again, we see the problems with this ecosystem: There is a way to get a semi-normal looking toolbar/ribbon on the bottom of the app, but it won’t display by default, so you have to enable editing and then click a button to get it there. Silly.

And not to be beat that topic to death, but in looking at the apps I might want to use in Desktop Mode, I kept running into similar problems. Notion displays a phone-like toolbar at the bottom, for example, but there’s no navigation bar like the one we see on the web, the desktop, and, yes, the iPad. Worse, the app doesn’t even work in Desktop Mode: I can’t open a note or create a new note anyway.

Next steps

To be clear, Desktop Mode requires you to enable Developer Mode first, so this is hardly a mainstream activity. So Google has time to get it right, and I would imagine that as it proceeds through the quarterly QPR updates to Android 16, it will take steps to improve this feature. Once it’s where it needs to be, we can start thinking about docking scenarios and native Android laptops and Chromebooks. And tablets, actually, he writes while looking disappointedly at the Pixel Tablet over there that will never see a hardware upgrade. For some reason.

Until and if that happens, the iPad offers a mainstream and high-quality laptop experience right now. And that’s a threat Google needs to answer.