Split screen on phones is not a feature I take advantage of often, probably because it always feels so cramped on such a small screen with two apps mostly split down the middle. On a tablet, it makes a slot of sense and I frequently pin apps or split them to get more things done at once with the extra screen real estate – it’s just the phone situation that I can’t handle. Samsung clearly understands this and is making a change to split screen in One UI 8 that might make it more appealing for people like me.
In the changelog for One UI 8, Samsung says they’ve enhanced split screen view by allowing you to “push one app against the edge of the screen to keep it partially visible while giving most of your focus to the other app.” In other words, you can drag the split screen bar to the very bottom or top edge to allow one app to take up most of the screen.
And as an added bonus, when you’ve stretched one app to about 90% of the split screen, you can tape the small area to quickly flip apps and expand that one. You can do this over and over again to dance between each app getting big and small screens. It’s super slick.
OnePlus has had something similar to this for some time. In fact, OnePlus’ multi-tasking, especially on foldables and tablets, is essentially the gold standard in the industry. To see Samsung take inspiration from them makes a lot of sense if they want to improve in this area.
