Android 17: Google's 'Everything OS' is Here

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]Android 17 is coming and there's a lot more to talk about than just the usual phone stuff this year. Android is becoming Google's everything OS designed for every screen whether it's a slab, a tab, fold, or even something much bigger that's attached to a keyboard. So yeah, Android in 2026 is about much more than just a device in your pocket. We've known for some time that Chrome OS is being merged into Android to form something cenamed Aluminium OS.

[00:00:25]Basically Google's new Android for the desktop. So, let's take a look at the new features you'll actually care about in Android 17 and what they tell us about just how serious Google is when it comes to taking on Apple and Microsoft on the desktop. The launch is likely just a few weeks away at the time we're making this video. So, let's get straight into it. So, the app bubbles feature has been around in various forms for a few years now, but in Android 17, it's graduated from being just a timesaver for messaging apps to a core part of multitasking for the entire OS.

[00:00:55]It's not quite free form widows in the same way you'd find them on a Samsung or OnePlus phone, but it serves a very similar purpose. And if you think about the way this bubble-based multitasking looks, it is sort of a distillation of the way windowed multitasking works on a much larger display. You've got your full screen app in the background and then a collection of foreground apps living on top of that that you can quickly hop between. It's activated with a long press of any app on the home screen. As far as I can tell, this is the only way to make apps bubble at present. I would appreciate a few different ways to pop apps in and out of this bubble stack, but hey, it is a decent start here. If you're using app bubbles on a larger display, like a foldable or a tablet, then your stack of bubbled apps can minimize down into this little shortcut pill in the gesture area, and you can conjure it back into view with a swipe upwards, as well as moving it between different sections of the display. It is still locked in that phone aspect ratio after all. Right now, you can have five bubbled apps open at a time, and as you open more, then older apps will be snoozed and put into this overflow menu over here. It's a behavior that mirrors the way the phone-based desktop mode works. Currently, the maximum number of active apps you can have on a larger display when it's plugged into a phone is also five. I'll have a little more to say on desktop mode a bit later. For now, though, I am really liking what Google's done with its app bubbles in Android 17. It's enough to make multitasking more convenient without completely recreating the desktop UI on a smaller phone display.

[00:02:20]A large part of Google's challenge of the next year will be getting Android's app library ready for use with a keyboard, trackpad, and a larger display as it becomes a fullyfledged desktop OS.

[00:02:30]And there is quite a lot to talk about here. Some areas more technical than others. So, let's power through this and then we'll go back to some more phone ccentric stuff a little later. The one thing Google wants to avoid for Android on laptops is just having a bunch of phone-shaped apps floating about on a widecreen panel. That's not a good look for anyone, especially if you're trying to maximize that app to fill the entire display. So, in Android 17, apps no longer have an opt out of supporting things like specific display densities, aspect ratios, or screen orientations.

[00:02:59]Plenty of non- Googlele devices have let you ignore app's own restrictions for a while, but Google has been tightening things up over the past couple of versions. And so now, if you're building apps for Android 17, developers can't just arbitrarily opt out of supporting bigger or wider displays. Equally important, Android 17 brings a new memory limiter feature to prevent misbehaving apps from using up more than their fair share of RAM. The goal here isn't to stop heavy duty apps like video editors or games from using a lot of resources. It's more about stopping memory leaks and other bugs before they cause systemwide issues or other kinds of slowdowns. just the kind of thing you need for a solid, stable desktop OS. And for a desktop class OS, you also want to avoid apps being killed off just because something changes with your display or the peripherals attached to it. So, to that end, Android 17 now no longer restarts activities when these kind of changes occur. Think of things like a keyboard being attached, the display color mode changing, or desktop mode being enabled. It's a near certainty that some of the Android laptops being launched with aluminium OS will be convertible. Though this is all super important stuff and even on a regular old boring laptop, these are the kinds of changes you need for basic functionality like external monitor support. Something we haven't seen just yet in the real world is Android 17's cross device handoff API, but it's included in the technical documents and could have big implications for folks using an Android phone with an Android laptop. This allows apps to hand off activities between different devices running Android 17. Simply put, this could mean not just moving an app from your phone to your Android laptop, but having it pick up from precisely where you left off when it does. The Android 17 documentation specifically calls out using the home screen launcher to suggest a handoff when two devices are nearby. So, if you approach your laptop with Google Docs open, for example, you might get an alert to pick up that exact document on that exact page from that larger device. A desktop OS also needs great creative app support and that appears to be the idea behind the new eyropper color picker API in Android 17.

[00:05:02]This lets apps pick a color from a specific pixel on the display without needing permission to record the entire screen. So for something like full desktop Photoshop on Android, this could be a really useful addition.

[00:05:16]Desktop mode itself, that is the UI you get when you plug a phone into a monitor, has been slowly going from strength to strength throughout the Android 17 beta. Desktop backgrounds now work a bit more reliably than they did in earlier versions, and support for higher res monitors are among a handful of bug fixes that have arrived over the past few months. Mainly though, desktop mode is interesting because it gives us our clearest look at how the actual Android laptop UI will look once the OS properly comes to the desktop with robust windowing, app snapping, multiple desktops, and more. But it's actually Samsung's Dex mode, which itself is now based on the Android desktop mode code that gives us a clearer look at how this OS might adapt itself to the actual laptop hardware that we're all expecting later in 2026. The new Dex 8.5 on the Galaxy S26 Ultra supports widgets and app shortcuts on the desktop, a more sane notification management and system tray interface lifted straight from Windows, and more elegantl looking app resizing. It's recently been reported that Samsung will indeed be shipping at least three variants of Android-based Galaxy Book later in the year from entry level right up to flagship with an interface heavily based on what you see here in the fo-based Samsung Dex. And given that it shares its codebase with Android's own desktop mode, a lot of the extra functionality that you see here could in time find its way to other Android laptops. We've got full videos on both Samsung Dex 8.5 and the vanilla Android desktop mode if you want a closer look. So, with that said, back to some more everyday phone stuff. Android obviously has a huge library of games available, but not all of them are designed for a bigger screen or physical controllers. Even if they are, changing controls isn't always easy. And so in Android 17 across all devices, you can now easily remap controller keys, triggers, and sticks with this new system level menu. It's not hard to see how this option could be very useful if you're gaming on a phone or an Android laptop. There are also controls in Android 17 baked in to enforce app level dark theme, even on apps that don't explicitly support it. This isn't new on phones. Samsung's been doing this for a while, but it is useful to have on any device. And if you're thinking about a laptop, possibly with an OLED display, it'll be extra useful to avoid having one mischievous app burning those pixels with an all-white screen. Meanwhile, Android's cameras are getting ready for the future with RAW 14 support providing around 16,000 tonal values per color channel, a four times increase from RAW 12, meaning preserving more image detail before processing crunches it down. And H.266 266 decode support gets the OS ready for the newer, more efficient video codec that'll be arriving on phones in the coming years. A welcome privacy boost as the new contact picker will let you give an app access to a specific contact without letting them see your entire contact list. Seems like a really helpful change as let's face it, most apps don't need the phone numbers of everyone you've ever met.

[00:08:06]Finally, Google seems to be teasing some lighting related features for its upcoming Android show ahead of IO 2026 with this little bug droid guy dancing around here. Some folks are saying that that means a kind of Android-based liquid glass effect is going to be coming. Google Samir Sat has already debunked that and obviously we are less than a year removed from material 3 expressive so way too soon for another major visual refresh. Anyway, what this could relate to though is the rumored pixel glow or pixel lights feature that we've seen reported from various leakers and referenced in the Android 17 code itself as a way for external lighting panels to show you specific feedback.

[00:08:45]For example, when someone calls you or when you're interacting with Gemini.

[00:08:48]Think a more googly version of the kind of thing Nothing has been doing in its phones for the past several years. And the code references dug up by Android Authority point to this feature being supported across both phones and laptops for whatever that's worth. So if you look at this little robot guy here, you could be forgiven for spotting a light bar not too unlike that of the original Chromebook Pixel from way back in 2013.

[00:09:11]So yeah, physical lights on your Android phone and maybe also Android laptop, I think, is what's being teased here.

[00:09:19]Either way, we shouldn't have too much longer to wait to find out what Android 17 will be bringing to our devices, be they desktop or handset. We should know more by the end of May, where Google will likely lay out the next wave of major Android features for the Android 17 QPR1. That's the first feature drop update, which following the new two major releases per year policy, should put some meat on the bones of the base Android 17 version that will be launching more imminently. Let me know what you're most looking forward to in Android 17, especially laptop-wise. Do you think Android's ready now to graduate to being a full desktop OS?

[00:09:52]Stick around and subscribe for more. But for now, thanks for watching and I'll see you next time.