The slew of announcements at Google I/O meant a few things from the annual keynote flew under the radar, amid a deluge of Gemini-based features. One of those was a good, old-fashioned piece of software design ingenuity for Android device users.
Android 17 will introduce a new ‘Continue On’ feature that finally gives Google-based users the opportunity to easily pick up tasks on other devices, like a tablet for instance.
“Continue On enables users to start an Android app on one Android device and then transition to another device in their Android ecosystem, continuing the user journey they started,” Google says in a blog post for developers.
It’s very similar to Apple’s long-standing Handoff feature, which quickly enables iPhone users to access things like open web pages or Notes on their Mac, from their iPhone or iPad. That feature has been around since 2014, so it’s about time Google offered an equivalent.
The examples Google uses is the ability to continue composing a Gmail email in the Chrome browser on a tablet, which began life in the Gmail app for smartphones. Just like the Apple feature, the Continue On feature even has a Handoff Suggestion, which appears in the app dock of the tablet interface when it spies a user is working on, say, a Google Docs document on smartphone. You can see it demonstrated in the briefest mention at Google I/O yesterday. The video is time-stamped for your viewing pleasure.
Overall, Google says, it’s designed to enable users to choose the device best suited to the task at hand, rather than mess about trying to edit a Google Sheets document, for example, on a 6-inch smartphone. Whether it’ll work on the desktop platform running ChromeOS remains to be seen, but Google hasn’t commented yet.
The feature will roll out in Android 17 later this summer, with Pixel users likely getting the first dibs on that. For a full round-up of Google’s announcements yesterday, check out our run down. There’s also a look at the forthcoming Wear OS 7.
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