Android 14is here, and while Google kept itsbest features exclusive to its Pixel lineup, plenty of new features are coming to your phone soon. While some of this update’s best content is hidden behind the scenes, you’ll find some crucial new tools perfect for multitasking, especially if you haven’t upgraded to one ofour favorite foldables. Whether you’re rocking aGoogle Pixel 8 Proor aSamsung Galaxy S23 Ultrarunning the One UI 6 beta, here’s how to drag and drop between apps on Android 14.
What exactly is drag and drop?
With the dragging and dropping feature, you can select any amount of text and move it to different apps without copying or saving content to your device. The possibilities for this are endless. You can select an ingredients list and move it to your notes app or select troubleshooting instructions from Reddit to send to a friend. It helps make single-screen multitasking more of a reality.
An old feature on a new form factor
If this feature sounds old to you, it is.Apple added this to iOS years ago— even expanding on it in iOS 16 with itsinfamous drag-and-drop-the-dog demo— and Google added it to Android 13 in 2022. The big difference? Drag and drop on Android was limited to just split-screen multitasking. While this worked on single-screen devices in split-view mode, it was a bit of a headache, a tool that was more useful and usable on foldables like the Galaxy Z Fold 5 or Pixel Fold.
With Android 14, Google made it a little easier for anyone, regardless of their device, to move text between apps. You don’t need to enter split-view mode, and you don’t need to upgrade your phone to a foldable to make things easier. All you do is highlight your content and perform some impressive finger gymnastics.
How to drag and drop between apps on Android 14
Grab your smartphone running Android 14 and open the app you want to take content from. We tested this on a stable version of Android 14 running on a Pixel 8 Pro and theOne UI 6beta running on a Galaxy S23 Ultra. We use images from both below.
And that’s it! You can now edit, send, or do anything else with the text after it’s placed, just as if you’d written it yourself.
Issues and limitations with dragging and dropping on Android
Android 14 can be a little finicky about this. Sometimes, the text fails to paste in for no reason. Repeat this process if this happens to you, as we’ve seen it more successful on second tries.
It doesn’t look like drag-and-drop works with photos across the board. We tried every combination of apps and photos on the Pixel 8 Pro and Galaxy S23 Ultra. Although you may drag some photos between content — such as images out of internet browsers — they often disappear when you release your finger.
One place we found where this tool works is in the file browser. There, dragging and dropping works similarly with files as it does with text, as the content appears as its file name. From there, we’ve been able to move images to Google Keep and Messages without any issues. Hopefully, Google will add support for moving media between apps to more places, including the web, to prevent the need to save or copy photos and videos.
A useful, if limited, Android tool
Although it’s far from perfect, moving content between apps without entering split-screen mode is a super useful tool. With any luck, Google will continue to make this feature more powerful in future versions of Android. Until then, consider changingthese five settings in Android 14to make the experience even better.
