Bubbles help users prioritize information and take action deep within another app, while maintaining their current context. They also let users carry an app’s functionality around with them as they move between activities on their device.
Bubbles are great for messaging because they let users keep important conversations within easy reach. They also provide a convenient view over ongoing tasks and updates, like phone calls or arrival times. They can provide quick access to portable UI like notes or translations and can be visual reminders of tasks, too.
So, yeah: Messaging was a small part of the picture, but Bubbles was supposed to be so much more than that. It was meant to represent a new way of getting stuff done on your phone — something that seemed, as I put it at the time, like it could be “a mobile multitasking breakthrough.”
Now, five years later, we may finally see that original vision play out. Under-development code reveals fresh progress on Android’s Bubbles system that’d let you put any app into a bubble and keep it available on demand, exactly as we’d seen teased several years ago. This could open the door to some seriously interesting new ways of multitasking and pulling up elements like notes, emails, documents, and even web pages while viewing something else at the same time — without having to resort to a much more rigid split-screen interface, which isn’t always optimal (especially on a smaller-screened device).
We don’t yet know exactly what form this could take or even if it’ll necessarily show up in Android 16, but seeing it come back to the forefront after all these years is a very welcome surprise and something well worth watching throughout 2025.
Stay tuned
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in analyzing Google all these years, it’s that you never fully know what the company might be thinking — and there’s always room for the element of surprise.
