Split Screen Launcher: One of the few split-screen apps still working on Android 15, 16, and 17

1. Background: why "App Pair" matters on Android

Android has supported split-screen multitasking since version 7.0 (Nougat, 2016). What it has never supported at the OS level is saving combinations of two apps and launching them together. Samsung added this to One UI as "App Pair" back in 2017, and users who move from Galaxy to Pixel almost immediately notice it's gone.

The workaround is to install a third-party launcher that automates the two-step process: open app A, open app B into the adjacent window. Google Play lists dozens of these — but the ecosystem is messier than it looks, because each Android release changes how split-screen can be invoked, and most of these apps don't get updated.

Android 15 (2024) finally introduced a native App Pair feature at the OS level — but Google scoped it to large-screen devices only. Pixel Tablet got it; Pixel 9 Pro didn't. As of mid-2026, here's the lay of the land on phones:

• Samsung Galaxy phones — native App Pair since 2017 (via Edge Panel)
• Pixel phones (regular models, not Tablet or Fold) — none
• Xiaomi, OnePlus, Oppo, Realme, Vivo, Motorola, Nokia, Sony, ASUS — none

So on phones, native App Pair is effectively a Samsung-only feature. Everyone else either uses Android's manual split-screen (open app, long-press recents, drag, repeat) or installs a third-party launcher like this one.

A Samsung App Pair alternative for Pixel and stock Android

If you've moved from a Galaxy phone to a Pixel — or to any stock-Android phone — and you're looking for a Samsung App Pair alternative, this is the gap we built Split Screen Launcher to fill. You get the same one-tap "launch both apps side-by-side" behavior, without needing a Samsung device or the Edge Panel.

It's also one of the few options that is still a split-screen app that works on Android 15, 16, and 17 — with no ads, no tracking SDKs, and no Accessibility permission for the split-screen core on Android 12L and up (the optional SideEdge sidebar is the one exception). Most older app-pair tools lean on system shortcuts that recent Android releases closed off; this one reaches split view through a path we've kept working across each OS update.

2. What Split Screen Launcher actually does

Split Screen Launcher is a single-purpose utility. You pick two apps, name the pair ("Commute", "Work", "YouTube + Instagram"), and the pair shows up as a row in the app. Tapping it opens both apps side-by-side.

That's really the entire feature set. No built-in browser, no floating widgets, no notification panel integration. The app is lightweight — a few megabytes — and it doesn't run anything in the background.

Example pairs we used during testing:

• Google Maps + Spotify — driving
• YouTube + Instagram — second-screen viewing
• Chrome + Google Keep — research with notes
• Gmail + Slack — work triage
• Calculator + Chrome — comparing prices across tabs

One use case we didn't anticipate: the car. A user told us they run Split Screen Launcher on the Android AI box in their vehicle, pairing Maps + Spotify for navigation with music — and switching to Maps + Netflix for whoever's in the passenger seat. Because launching a pair is a single tap, it suits a car head-unit far better than long-pressing through the recents menu.

Trigger your pairs automatically — MacroDroid, Automate, Tasker

Another use case we didn't plan for came from a completely different corner: a motorcycle. A rider using the app on a handlebar-mounted tablet wanted their MacroDroid automation to bring up a saved pair on its own — an ignition-triggered macro that opens the split with no taps while riding. That request became a feature. As of version 3.0.4, a saved pair can be launched through Android's standard shortcut picker, so a macro fires the split the same way it fires any other action. It's a Pro feature, strictly limited to launching your pre-saved pairs. If you don't use automation tools this won't matter to you — but for the hands-free, on-the-road corner of our users, it closes the gap between "one tap" and "no taps."

You can trigger a saved pair from MacroDroid, Tasker, or Automate.

• MacroDroid — Add Action → Applications → Launch Shortcut
• Tasker — Add Action → App → Shortcut → Choose
• Automate — App start block → Pick shortcut

Once the picker opens, select Split Screen, then choose the pair you want to trigger.

In Automate, using the App shortcut start block won't let you save the flow — use App start.

A time of day. A Bluetooth connection. Arriving home. Plugging in headphones. Automation apps can bring up an app pair from all sorts of triggers.

Backup and export

One detail worth calling out because it's easy to miss: pair data exports to a backup file. That sounds trivial, but several competing apps in this category store their pairs in app-private storage with no export path — switching phones means rebuilding every pair by hand. We made the backup/restore a first-class feature precisely so a Pixel-to-Pixel migration restores the full set in seconds.

A clean home screen

And another design choice worth noting up front: by default, pairs live inside the app — no home-screen icons are created. The reason is partly to keep things simple (the home screen doesn't get cluttered with pair icons) and partly architectural — the app isn't tied to specific launchers (Pixel, Nova, etc.). As noted in section 3, shortcut-dependent launchers are exactly the kind that tend to break across Android 15 and 16 transitions; staying inside the app makes phone-to-phone migration smoother.

An optional pin-to-home action lets Pro users launch a pair with a single tap straight from the home screen. We wanted to keep the original "keep the home screen simple" posture intact while still answering the "I want to launch the split right from a home icon" need. The icon shown on home stacks the two app icons vertically, so the pair stays visually distinct from regular launcher icons.

Per-pair screen orientation

Tapping the icon next to a pair's ⋮ menu cycles that pair's screen orientation.

• Off — the default; the icon is dimmed
• Auto-rotate — follows how you hold the device
• Portrait lock
• Landscape lock

Where each one earns its place:

• YouTube + X locked to landscape — the split opens in landscape from the moment you tap
• Maps + music locked to portrait — stays portrait even when the car mount tilts

SideEdge — launch your pairs from any screen

Version 3.0 adds SideEdge: a pull-out sidebar you swipe in from the edge of the screen. It lists your saved pairs and single apps, so you can fire a split — or jump straight to one app — from any screen, without first going back to the home screen.

If you came from a Galaxy phone, this is the part that will feel familiar. Samsung's Edge Panel is how a lot of people launched App Pairs on One UI — a tab on the side of the screen that slides out a tray of shortcuts. SideEdge is our take on that idea, brought to any Android phone or tablet. It isn't a complete replacement for Samsung's version, but it gets you a similar experience — and like the rest of the app, it's ad-free. If you've been looking for an Edge Panel alternative on Pixel or stock Android, this is one of the closest options we've found.

A floating handle sitting on top of a login or password screen would block you from typing into it. So SideEdge uses an Accessibility Service for one narrow job — to recognize those security screens and pull the handle out of the way so you can type, then bring it back when you're done. It never reads, collects, or transmits screen content. Full detail is in Permissions and privacy below.

Who this app is for (and who should skip it)

Before we dive into the technical side, here's a quick check so you can decide whether the rest of this article is worth your time.

Still interested? The rest of this article covers the technical background — why Android 15 and 16 broke most of the alternatives, and the design decisions behind our approach.

3. The Android 15/16 problem — and why most competitors broke

This is the interesting part, and the reason most competing apps have stopped working.

Historically, split-screen launchers have relied on a handful of OS-level APIs that Google has gradually tightened or removed. Each new Android release has chipped away at the methods third-party apps use to launch two apps side-by-side. Android 15 and 16 in particular closed off the most common routes. Shell-level workarounds fail in similar ways.

In plain terms: the "tricks" third-party apps used to flip the phone into split mode don't work anymore on Android 15 and 16. Most apps in this category never shipped a fix.

Split Screen Launcher reaches split view reliably on Android 15, 16, and the new Android 17 via a different path. We're keeping the exact mechanism to ourselves — it took a fair amount of experimentation to find a combination that works across OS versions, and publishing the recipe would effectively be handing it to every broken competitor. What we can say is that our release history reflects active maintenance across the Android 12, 12L, 14, 15, 16, and 17 transitions, and we intend to keep that cadence going.

4. Permissions and privacy

On Android 12L and newer, launching a pair requires no runtime permissions and no Accessibility Service — the core split-screen flow relies entirely on standard Android system behavior. Extra access is only ever requested for two optional features you choose to turn on yourself.

① Per-pair screen orientation (optional permission) — if you set an orientation on a specific pair, only then does the app request the "Display over other apps" permission: the orientation is held by a window shown over the screen. It changes none of your device's own settings. You won't see the prompt unless you use that feature.

② Enabling SideEdge (optional feature) — turning on the sidebar uses two permissions. The first is "Display over other apps", which lets the panel appear over your screen. The second is the Accessibility Service, used for one narrow, defensive purpose: it detects when a secure system screen is active — a login field, password manager, two-factor prompt, or banking app — and automatically tucks the handle and panel out of the way so they never sit over sensitive input. It never reads, collects, or transmits your screen content. Both permissions stay completely off unless you grant them explicitly through the Android system dialogs.

On Android 9 through 12, the app does need Accessibility Service permission, because that's the only available API. The Play Store listing is explicit that the service is only used to trigger split-screen mode. The permission list shown by Google Play is short enough that you can read the whole thing on one screen — no location, no contacts, no storage, and (notably) no network. That's already unusual for this corner of the Play Store.

In plain terms: on older Android versions there was no official API for triggering split screen, so Accessibility Service was the only workable route. It's a legacy constraint, not something the app uses to read your screen.

For comparison, most free split-screen apps on the Play Store bundle ad SDKs (AdMob, Unity, IronSource), which means they ship with the INTERNET permission and the tracker bundle that comes with it. We chose to monetize via a minimal subscription instead — partly to keep the permission footprint clean, partly because bundling ad SDKs into a utility this small would balloon its size.

5. How we compare to other split-screen apps

Before the comparison itself, it's worth sketching the landscape. "App Pair"-style functionality has been approached from a few angles:

• OEM-specific implementations — Samsung's App Pair (since One UI, 2017), plus variants on Xiaomi, OPPO, and the old LG. These only work on that manufacturer's devices.
• Third-party utilities — standalone apps dedicated to this single use case. Most are built on OS-level APIs that have been narrowed or removed in recent Android versions, which is why the landscape has thinned out considerably.
• Automation-based approaches — Tasker and similar tools can script a split-launch, but they rely on the same underlying primitives as dedicated apps, so they inherit the same breakage. They also require users to build each pair manually. As of version 3.0.4 we've added a straightforward way to hook into these tools: you can launch a saved pair from MacroDroid, Tasker, or Automate (Pro).

The third-party landscape itself is fragmented. Google Play surfaces dozens of dedicated split-screen utilities, but activity and quality are unevenly distributed.

The most-downloaded apps in this niche have racked up millions of installs, yet the field's leaders are surprisingly weak: the biggest of them combines that large reach with a mediocre review score, and another widely-installed alternative was last updated in mid-2025 and still hasn't shipped a fix for the Android 15 / 16 split-screen API changes. Several others price aggressively, with steep weekly subscriptions that have drawn criticism in user communities.

The common patterns across this field: most apps either stopped updating around Android 11–12, ship with intrusive banner or interstitial ads, or require the Accessibility Service permission across all Android versions (the split-screen core here drops that requirement on Android 12L+; only the optional SideEdge sidebar uses it). That makes the field unusually thin in terms of well-maintained, low-permission options.

A small, actively maintained, ad-free app like this one has an easy path to standing out — but only if users can find it.

6. Pricing

The free tier caps the number of saved pairs so users can try the full workflow before deciding whether it fits their habits. Core functionality — creating pairs, launching them, backup/restore — all works without paying.

The Pro subscription runs around $1 / month depending on region, removes the pair limit, and adds folder organization plus icon color customization. Standard Google Play subscription, cancel anytime.

For context: other paid split-screen utilities in the same category have premium tiers ranging from a one-time fee of a few dollars up to steep weekly subscriptions. At $1/month this is roughly an order of magnitude cheaper than the closest paid competitor.

7. Summary — who this is for

Get it on Google Play