Taking better advantage of a display is nice but imo the really exciting part of desktop mode is the planned integration with Google's Linux Terminal app (i.e. 1st party linux VM support). I have a Samsung DeX device and while you can get a basic dev environment working easily it can be really cumbersome to make it comfortable to use and integrate with your normal tablet workflow. Being able to install full-fat linux apps and run them in a window would be a complete game changer.
source for planned integration: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/392521081?utm_source=...
If you haven't tried it, especially if your workplace allows your phone to have access to some corporate data, DeX + a good pair of AR or just integrated display glasses feels like the future.
I run my S23 Ultra with a pair of XReal One's, and a folding Bluetooth keyboard (DeX let's you use your phone as a touchpad). It is really amazing in widescreen mode sitting in a coffee shop, reading through technical documents and answering work email. When I'm done, it can all fold up and fit in a (spacious) pair of cargo shorts.
I think Samsung has played the long game on DeX, with an eye towards their collaborative XR glasses with Google next year. As great as XReal has been, I am eager to see a "first-party" solution.
this done well is a transformational thing, its just no one has been willing to invest yet, but the compute on a phone is now good enough to do most things most users do on desktop.
I can easily see the future of personal computing being a mobile device with peripherals that use its compute and cloud for anything serious. be that airpods, glasses, watches, or just hooking that device up to a larger screen.
theres not a great reason for an individual to own processing power in a desktop, laptop, phone, and glasses when most are idle while using the others.
Scrcpy recently added support for Virtual Display. This allows connecting your phone at any resolution e.g. 1920x1080. But vanilla android by default does not have a taskbar in that mode.
What's strange is that vanilla OS does show a taskbar (tablet mode) if you increase DPI to 600+. Theoretically you can get a taskbar now only if tablet mode taskbar could show up in secondary virtual displays.
https://github.com/Genymobile/scrcpy/blob/master/doc/virtual...
I've tried it. I was pretty impressed. I plugged in a USB-C hub with a keyboard, mouse, and monitor and everything worked immediately, even the Windows key on the keyboard.
Every year or so I've been toying with the idea of a thin client dev environment. Smallest possible device that can run Linux (or a RDP client) and support being plugged in to a single USB-C dock cable (display, usb for keyboard/mouse and power).
Maybe this is the answer? Even though I don't need the screen, the footprint of a smartphone is smaller than almost all SBC supporting the above requirements.
Worked more than one year on Dex years ago. Developed a million-user website with Tmux.
The only thing that wouldn't work was a ruby CSS library that had a (if processor='arm') {crash()}.
What a pleasure to have a computer in your pocket.
This is the only natural path if mobile chips are going to keep getting faster, everyone with a flagship phone is "wasting" so much good compute resources that never gets utilized.
I wonder if we'll see USB-C docks for phones with fans blowing at the device for improved thermals.
If they nail the Linux container UX as well as ChromeOS it would motivate me to buy a top-tier device rather than my sluggish Fairphone 4, right now I don't see the usecase other than good camera.
Imagine thst a large userbase could just skip the laptop and desktop in favor of a USB-C dock and a decent display :)
Finally! This is just shy of being 10 years late though. Lots of people would basically stop buying laptops with something like this on their phones (and that's why Apple will never do it)
Re-posting this at top level, curious what others think.
Since Windows has started this iteration of their move to ARM, I wondered if Microsoft would be the first to do this properly, by building an adaptable/mobile Desktop/UX to Windows 12 (or 13), pumping up the Microsoft Store, and then relaunching the Windows (Surface, I guess) Phone with full fat Windows on it.
In a way it's the same strategy that Nintendo used to re-gain a strong position in gaming (including the lucrative Home Console market where they'd fallen to a distant last place) - drafting their dominance in Handheld into Home Console by merging the two.
I switched from a lifetime of iPhones to an android phone last year, just because of folding phones. They are amazing and IMO the reason why Apple is going to have issues as these get cheaper (unless they release a folding phone too). Now that I have all this screen estate the current UI feels limiting often.
My main issue with Android as a daily driver for desktop computing is the input latency. Even in high end devices, it's noticeable when typing and very noticeable for things like Alt-Tab and other desktop shortcuts. I wonder if this is fixable or if this is inherent to Android's architecture.
This is very good news. Especially in light of recent attention given to the possibility of CPU shortages. Lots of programming tasks can be done comfortably on a smartphone. For example, no build front end programming. The description "desktop view" is unfortunate since it calls to mind a browser mode where the site is displayed as it would be on a desktop. And this is something completely different. I do hope this mode does not require an external display because it would be quite useful even with the phone's native display. Especially given their hypixel density and the availability of reading glasses.
I could be remembering incorrectly, but wasn't this also a thing back in the Droid Bionic days? I remember being super thrilled at the idea of using my phone on a bigger external screen as another linux computer or TV screen.
I will never use Android on the desktop as long as Play Integrity is a thing.
> Google Is Catching Up to Samsung DeX
Does anyone use DeX?
Of course they will enshitten it into unusability, but in theory they could put one over on Apple with this. It's "only" the software that stops Apple's iDevices from being usable as development platforms or general purpose computers. Google could offer something here that Apple won't.
I am hearing about Google developing a desktop mode for probably 10 years now.
I'll just stick to Dex which has been available since forever until Google finally figures their shit out.
The clock and notification area are still at top doesn't make sense. These should move to taskbar in desktop mode.
Really hopeful this is the next frontier for mobile. Pair this with wider Field of view at glasses and a compact keyboard, and you can have a full it desktop environment in your pocket
I have been waiting for this to go mainstream for nearly six years now.
The whole point of having USB C phones is to connect to desktop docks and get full featured computers. Instead we have muzzled devices.
I would love something that I can use and maybe even use an RDP on, to function as a full desktop computer.
But like all common sense improvements, some come just too late after the boat has sailed.
Pretty sure Windows Phone did this over a decade ago. I mean, say what you want about Windows Phones, but yeah, this was a thing.
I've been using BlueStacks X to run android apps on desktop. Seems to work okay.
None of the mobile Linux distribution is working on this, even though it should be easier for them to fallback to a DE than for Android to invent a new one.
This must be a video game since they laid off most of the people after it was made
Is it just me or people here also think that the end game for this is to replace Chrome OS on Chromebooks.
The excitement I feel about this shows how effectively Google and Apple have stockholmed us. We have supercomputers in our pockets and we can't even use them for some of the most fundamental computing tasks.
Is this an AI-generated article? Article about novel UI with no screenshots??
....and it's not wireless?! even Android Auto has a wireless mode...
Imagine Apple doing something like that, with MacOS now having some UI that is similar to iOS one might think could be the case in the future
Wait till John Solomon finds out about this!
Welcome to ChromeOS 2.0
Once again, goggle catches up with linux features from 10 years ago.
Just one example article, using a chroot environment:
https://www.nextpit.com/turn-your-android-device-into-a-linu...
But Ubuntu touch, and other native linux phone installs have touted desktop mode over the years.
The h/w 10 years ago was marginal at performing this task, and the non-corporate OSes were, and are, actively suppressed by goggle and the rest of the corporate "phone" development industry. This is an almost identical scenario as M$ dominating the PC manufacturing business, even though they didn't make the h/w.
But this serves as another typical example of how long ago this type of feature could have been available if every new innovation didn't have to be vetted from the perspective of vendor benefit, instead of advancing on the basis of user benefit.
@dang why is this flagged? The flagging system on this site is so incredibly bad. It’s always a tiny handful of users trying to control what others can see with zero logical consistency.
I’m against smartphones. Sure, they’re a technological marvel, but they’re also incredibly dumb in practice. They’re built mainly for consumption, not creation. They feel like walled gardens that limit freedom and stifle creativity. The hardware might be amazing, but the software is awful. In the end, they mostly just make our kids dumber.
What I’d really like is a personal computer I can plug into a screen to work, then carry with me when I’m done. That would be a real step forward in personal computing. It would make laptops unnecessary.
Adopting this feels like a very risky proposition given Google's tendency to drop support for things. Samsung have supported DeX for almost a decade now.
Too many ads, didn’t read (tma;dr)
Multitasking on a phone? I know screens are getting bigger, but it seems like a bit much to me... I can understand this on a tablet, but having two windows that im interacting with at the same time on a phone would feel really cramped, unless its one of those fold phones that are 2 or 3 in 1
"Google’s Secret Weapon Against Samsung DeX"
Samsung has abandoned DeX, attempting to use it (if using Windows 11) the user is instructed to use Phone Link which is not nearly as good, imho.
As long as its primary/blessed development language remain Kotlin, the Android ecosystem will remain inaccessible to me. It's not that I can't learn Kotlin, but I don't want to. When I want to develop an application on my desktop, it boils down to just `g++ ...` it, if I chose to. That is to say, I don't need GBs worth of download and a blessed IDE and gluttonous build system (the abomination called Gradle) to make my application. So, Android spreading everywhere is not good news for me. It's OK on my phone - I only use it, not do much development on it. Well, I could have, but not with something I consider as reasonable effort.
This is the thing that bummed me out the most about Microsoft exiting the phone market.
I know Windows isn’t super popular around here, but the idea of carrying one device that I can just dock to work on always intrigued me.
There’s just no way this is taking off with any significant market share in the business world anytime soon being android only, and Apple will never adopt it because they want you to buy 3 different devices. Such a great concept, and with the performance of mobile chips getting so good, very viable.