I tested Desktop Mode on a Google Pixel 8

This blog post was painstakingly composed using the Desktop Mode of the Google Pixel 8 with a 24-inch monitor, a keyboard, a mouse and an i-Tec USB C dock.

The feature just about works, but there is some way to go yet before you can forgo buying a laptop.

I needed to enable the following settings in the Developer Options as well:
– Enable freeform windows on secondary display
– Enable freeform windows
– Enable non-resizable in Multi-Window

One of those settings required a restart of the phone, and I’m not certain that they are all required, however, I there is a limit to how much time and effort I’m willing to invest into this trivial detail.

One of the immediate bugs I faced was that while the keyboard and mouse were detected on initial connection, the mouse was constrained to the mobile phone screen only, leaving me with no way of interacting with the external display. It wasn’t until I went into the phone settings, found “External Display”, and toggled the rotation to 90 Degrees and back to Standard that the mouse appeared on the external display.

From this point forward, I was able to launch apps. I straightaway launched Firefox and began composing this post. There is a persistent keyboard bar that shows up, possibly related to auto suggestions and language settings that I could not disable, even though I had an external keyboard. I was however able to tuck it away into a corner of the screen.

Once I maximized an app, I could not figure out how to return it to a floating window size, nor how to bring back the menu to search for and launch a new app.

The external monitor display settings don’t appear to be independent. As far as I can tell, the display scaling is exactly the same as my phone display… My phone is set to a zoom level higher than 100% because I don’t like to squint to read text… this makes sense on my ~6 inch display, but is a bit absurd on an external monitor. I could not find a way to have the external display use a more reasonable zoom level.

I might make some time to send direct feedback to Google about this, and hopefully, they listen and are continuing to improve this feature for upcoming versions of Android.

PS. Hopefully, this is not too badly formatted. While it was possible to compose this on the phone with a keyboard and mouse, it was a bit constrained due to the limited multitasking abilities. I also couldn’t figure out how to resize an image for insertion into this post, for example, probably due to this being something I don’t regularly do on a phone.