Sometimes a new feature comes to Android that sounds great at first, but after a while you find it doesn't quite live up to the hype until you spend more time to figure out the right way to use it.
That happened to me with a new Android 17 feature called app bubbles. Used incorrectly, as I did in the beginning, this feature can add more clutter to how you use your phone. But after some time re-thinking the main intention of this feature, I finally unlocked the true power of app bubbles once I stopped using it as a novelty and started using it as a powerful productivity tool that helps me better focus.
Bubbles aren't just for chatting anymore
Android 17 brings bubbles to all apps
This isn't the first time Android has used bubbles. We first saw floating bubbles back with Android 11, when the feature was primarily used to keep interactions with key contacts front and center, similar to Facebook's Chat Heads feature from 2013.
But starting with Android 17, which is available now for most Pixel devices, Google let users turn any apps into bubbles, along with other new useful features. And using it is easy, but using it the right way is another matter that we'll discuss later in this article.
The way I originally used app bubbles was a confusing disaster, and you should learn from my mistakes.
Why floating apps didn't work for me
They took up too much screen space
When I first started using app bubbles, I was doing it all wrong. Originally, I thought about all the bubbles it would be "cool to have" floating on the screen all the time, like Telegram, Spotify and Reddit. I even experimented with Play Store, Gmail, and Chrome.
While these are all apps I often use, I don't need them to be on the screen all the time. In fact, having them there just made for more confusion, and it felt like I was trying to solve a problem I didn't even have. I was even trying to maximize the number of bubbles to the full four allotment, which only caused more clutter and chaos.
You see, switching apps is the enemy when you're trying to focus on a singular task. Some call it "monotasking" and when you want to monotask, you need to reduce distraction and have the main thing you're doing front and center, with a couple of tools within easy reach.
Once I changed the way I thought about this Android feature, things started to fall into place.
They made sense when I needed to focus on one thing
Bubbles made my writing much more efficient
App bubbles finally made sense when I decided to use them to monotask.
For example, I needed to do a final edit on an article I'm writing. So I triggered a Google Docs app bubble and added Claude to help with research, plus Asana, which our team uses to manage writing assignments.
Finally, app bubbles made sense
I kept the Docs bubble open most of the time, which is where my draft was. I could easily toggle to Claude for asking questions and help with research, or I could easily open the Asana task for my writing assignment to see if my manager had given me any special instructions for this particular writing assignment.
Finally, app bubbles worked for me when I used them this way. It was as if I had three screens that I could easily toggle between with just a tap of the bubbles, all in support of the main task I was working on: finishing an article. That said, bubbles are even more useful on folding phones.
Here's how to set them up
You can have up to four floating bubbles at once (previous betas of Android 17 let you have more bubbles, but the final version only allows four).
To start a bubble, just tap and hold any icon (on your home screen or in the app tray), and tap "Bubble" (look for the icon with the arrow and the dot) and the app will jump into a floating icon that you can move around to dock on any edge of the screen. To add more bubbles, just repeat the tap-and-hold action, or you can press the plus icon within an existing bubble which will show you your most recent bubbles to choose from.
Set up bubble shortcuts with folders
Pre-configure bubbles based on tasks you do
You can add app bubbles as you need them, but I'll leave you with a neat trick you can employ to get even more done with app bubbles.
You can group bubbles into home screen folders based on the task at hand, making it fast and easy to spin up a full set the moment you're ready to focus. Like for example, maybe you're a student and want to have a study folder, so that you can have bubbles for NotebookLM (which is coming to Chrome), along with your note-taking app of choice and your class schedule in another bubble. Then you have a full dashboard for studying that puts all of your resources at the fore, which makes using app bubbles even more valuable.
I'm glad to have found the right way to use this new Android feature to better focus on singular tasks. Sometimes you need to brush the novelty of a new feature aside in order to more thoughtfully understand how to best use a new tool or feature.