Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google is working on new features to manage external displays.
- These include the ability to rearrange displays, seamlessly move the mouse between displays, and a toggle to switch between mirroring and extending the display.
- These new external display management features could arrive in Android 16 but are more likely intended for a future release.
Google wants to turn Android into a proper desktop operating system, and in order to do that, it has to make it work better with traditional PC input methods and display options. Last year, Google added a new External Display settings page to Android, enabling users to adjust the display resolution and rotation of external monitors. This was a positive step, though it wasn’t enough for Android to compete with the likes of Windows, macOS, or even Google’s own Chrome OS. Google is now testing new external display management tools in Android 16 that bring Android closer to other desktop OSes.
When you connect recent Google Pixel phones to an external display, you have the option to mirror the screen. However, if you adjust some developer options, you can instead extend the screen, enabling the external display to show a basic desktop-like interface instead of mirroring the phone’s screen.
However, extending the screen from an Android phone to an external display doesn’t work the same as it does on PC operating systems. For one, the mouse is fixed to one screen and can’t be moved between displays. Another issue is that Android doesn’t let you switch between mirroring the screen and extending it, forcing you to tweak developer options and then reconnect the phone to change display modes.
To address the first issue, Google is enabling mouse cursor transitions across connected displays and adding the ability to rearrange them. The solution to the second issue is to add a toggle that switches between mirroring the built-in display and extending it. Neither of these features are enabled in the latest Android 16 Beta 2.1 release, but I managed to manually enable them with some effort.
In the video embedded below, you can see these new features in action. I start by connecting my Pixel 8 Pro to an external display—the NexDock XL—and then opening Android’s External Display settings on my phone. Initially, Android thinks my Pixel is placed below the NexDock even though it’s physically to the right of it, so to move the mouse cursor between them, I have to swipe up and down on the touchpad. However, after moving the window representing the Pixel’s screen to the right of the window representing the NexDock’s screen, I’m able to move the mouse cursor between displays by swiping left and right on the touchpad.
Just like on PCs, Android lets you precisely arrange the windows to match the actual boundaries of each display. Similarly, you can switch between mirroring and extending the screen by toggling “mirror built-in display.” In addition, you can also adjust the size of text and icons on the external display, separately from that of the built-in display. The ability to control the refresh rate of the external display is currently missing, but there are indications that Google is working on it.
While we spotted these features in Android 16 Beta 2.1, we don’t know if they’ll roll out in the upcoming stable release of Android 16. My guess is that these features won’t be present in the initial release of Android 16 but will be coming to its first quarterly release, similar to lock screen widget support for phones.
These additions might seem basic, but they’re crucial to making Android a proper desktop OS. Google wants to push Android as its unified desktop OS, which means transitioning Chrome OS to an Android base, so the company has to add features that consumers have come to expect from desktop platforms. It’ll take some time for Android to reach feature parity with Chrome OS, but we’re excited to see the end result.
