Further

Further thoughts on Android’s native desktop mode

I wrote last week of my delight in discovering that Android 16 has a native desktop mode, clearly based on Samsung’s “DEx”. I was doubly delighted to find that the desktop mode was available in the Android Open-Source Project, which forms the basis of most de-Googled alternative firmwares, like Lineage OS and Graphene.

Although Android’s native desktop mode went mainstream in June 2025 – more than a year ago as I’m writing this – it’s barely documented, and hardly publicised at all. If you’ve ever used Samsung DEx you’ll know what to expect but, if you haven’t, you’ll have to figure it out by trial-and-error. And it’s worth figuring out – recent Android handsets make quite effective desktop computers, when attached to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse.

I’ve been using desktop mode on my Samsung Note 9 running Lineage OS for the last week or so. My views haven’t changed substantially since my last article, but I have a better idea about how to use desktop mode productively. So I’m passing on some general hints, in the hope they’ll prove useful.

Although I’m running Lineage OS, I wouldn’t expect desktop mode to be much different on proprietary Android, so long as it isn’t heavily skinned by the vendor. In particular, everything below should apply to stock Google Pixel devices, provided they have the desktop mode enabled (the low-cost models, I believe, do not). I presume that Samsung devices run DEx, as they always have, rather than the Android native desktop.

Keep your handset handy

Even if I’m mostly using the external monitor, I find I need to keep the phone screen accessible and visible. Not only do some apps pop up on the phone screen even when I don’t want them to, some confirmation dialogs pop up on the phone even when the app itself is on the monitor. I’ve noticed that permissions dialogs are particularly troublesome here. If an app needs some specific permission, the prompt whether to allow it seems to appear on the phone screen, even if the app itself is showing happily on the monitor.

Some things just aren’t easy to do using the external monitor. So far as I can see, there are no volume controls, for example. I still have to reach for the volume buttons on the side of the phone.

Most importantly, there’s no way to activate a locked device other than using the handset. It would be nice if we could enter a PIN using the external keyboard, but that doesn’t work. It didn’t work on Samsung DEx, either, so there might be some complicated, technical reason for it.

Don’t be afraid to reboot

I’ve found that my use of desktop mode is much more reliable if I reboot my phone before using it. My use of the phone itself is more reliable if I reboot it afterwards. The handset and desktop modes of operation do fight one another to some extent.

Some desktop operations should be familiar

You can switch between apps using the alt+tab key combination, as in many desktop systems. Android being what it is, the list of selectable apps will often contain apps you thought you’d closed – there’s no proper “close” feature outside the “Force close” in the settings app. “Closing” an app from the desktop just hides it.

The “Windows” key on my USB keyboard brings up the app drawer, which saves a mouse click in the taskbar. You can pin a running app to the taskbar (right-click its icon), to provide easier access in future.

You can “pull down” from the top of the screen using the mouse, just as you would with a finger on the phone screen, to show notifications.

Work around audio issues (where possible)

The biggest problem I encountered when I first started using desktop mode was selecting where audio should be sent, and this remains my main irritation. By default, an app launched from the external screen has its audio sent to the HDMI port, while one launched from the phone screen has audio sent to the speaker or headphone jack.

My phone has a headphone jack, but I think you’ll be out of luck if yours doesn’t. I couldn’t get audio output to go to an external USB DAC or a headphone dongle, whether I launched the app from the phone screen or the monitor.

What this means in practice is that, unless you have a headphone jack (and want to use it), audio-playing apps can only be launched productively from the monitor, and even then only if the monitor supports HDMI audio.

A few, specialized audio apps, like Neutron, have their own USB DAC support. These apps will play to a USB DAC or a headphone dongle. So far as I can tell, VLC – although it offers a wealth of configuration options – doesn’t allow this, and nor does any other video app I tried. So playing video with the audio routed to a USB headphone dongle or DAC is currently (I think) impossible. Without a headphone jack it’s HDMI or the built-in speaker – and enabling speaker output is fiddly.

This limitation affects all applications that play audio (or video with a soundtrack), including web browsers, audiobook players, and many others. The solution is to use a monitor that supports HDMI audio or, perhaps, put an audio extractor with its own DAC between the phone and the monitor. These devices aren’t expensive but their audio quality, like that of HDMI monitors, is often quite poor.

If I start an app from the external monitor, and want to send output to the headphone jack or speaker, I can use the audio mixer settings. There’s a link to these settings below the volume slider on the phone screen (but not on the external monitor).

I’m more glad than ever, that my handsets all have headphone jacks.

Use the caption bar menu

Alongside the app name in each window’s caption bar is a control that brings up a menu. This menu allows you to switch the app to full-screen mode – which is often useful – but it might show other choices. For example, the file manager app shows “New window” in its menu. It’s not at all obvious that the file manager supports multiple windows, and I’ve not so far found any other app that does. The only way to discover hidden gems like this is to click everything, and see what happens.

Once the app’s window is full-screen, you can’t see the caption bar any more. To get a window back to normal size, you need to click the mouse on the very top or bottom of the screen, which uncovers a draggable handle.

You might need to disable the on-screen keyboard

When used without a hardware keyboard – as it nearly always is – Android will pop up the on-screen keyboard when an app needs keyboard input. If you do connect an external keyboard, this action is usually suppressed. In desktop mode, I’ve noticed some contention between the on-screen and external keyboards, since the external keyboard can – in principle – provide input to an app regardless where it is displayed.

If an app provides a way to block the on-screen keyboard, I’ve found it worth doing this when I’m using desktop mode. The Termux app, in particular, flashes the on-screen keyboard on and off whilst it’s waiting for input, unless I disable it, making the app almost unusable.

Be aware that “full screen” is a somewhat vague concept

For a regular Android app, “full screen” usually means running without the usual caption, menu bar, and other decorations. Android doesn’t usually allow multiple apps on the same screen, so all apps are “full screen” in a sense.

In desktop mode, apps run in variable-sized windows, and “full screen” might mean what it does in a regular desktop set-up: the app is resized so that its window fills the entire screen. The window frame itself may, or may not, be visible.

In desktop mode, all these various senses of “full screen” may by applicable. If there’s a button or menu labelled “full screen”, there may be no way to find out exactly what that means, except by trying it. You might need to make several changes to its settings to show an app in the broadest sense of “full screen”, where it fills the entire screen and there’s no window frame and the app itself shows no caption or menu bar.

Use external peripherals

Desktop mode doesn’t really change what peripherals Android supports. If you have a USB hub you can attach keyboard, mouse, storage devices, and so on. Although desktop mode doesn’t change what’s supported, some peripherals are easier to use. For example, I find it a lot easier to copy photos from my camera to my phone in desktop mode.

Use the command line

If you’re a Linux user, you can install a terminal app like Termux, and use Linux command-line utilities. This is possible without desktop mode, of course, but the external keyboard and large screen windows make this kind of usage practicable in a way that it really isn’t, just on the handset.

Accept that some apps work badly, or simply don’t work at all

It’s best not to get hung up about this, and just look for an alternative app. Most apps were not developed with desktop mode in mind and, frankly, I’m amazed that so many work as well as they do.

Don’t waste time looking for features that aren’t there…

A regular desktop environment has many, many features that Android desktop mode doesn’t provide – not yet, at least. Some of these features are so fundamental that I’ve spent hours looking for them in desktop mode, being confident that I would find them, and being disappointed when I didn’t.

You can change the general text size of the user interface, but that’s about the only stylistic change allowed. You can’t change the colours or shapes of any user interface element; you can’t change the desktop background from the stock solid grey; you can’t put the taskbar any place other than at the bottom of the screen, or change its behaviour; you can’t tune the mouse pointer acceleration; and so on.

Broadly, desktop mode looks and works as it does, and isn’t very configurable.

…and don’t expect flawless operation

Right now, Android’s native desktop mode has many bugs and limitations. Mostly I’ve found these to be irritations, rather than show-stoppers. For example, sometimes the focus of keyboard input switches from the external monitor to the handset for unclear reasons, but usually a mouse click gets things back on track. Occasionally a window frame overlaps part of an app’s display, but usually resizing the window sorts it out. With luck, future releases will be more polished.

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