Android tablet feature

 How to drag and drop between apps on your Android tablet

You can make your tablet a true multitasking cupid, uniting text, images and more between your favourite apps. Say you are surfing the web on your top-of-the-line Android tablet and come across a valuable piece of information that you want to save in your notes app. Perhaps you want to spice up a document with images from your gallery. Whichever it is, the drag-and-drop feature lets you seamlessly move items between apps in multi-window mode, and we show you how it works.

What is drag and drop on Android?

Android's drag and drop is like when you move things around on your computer by clicking and dragging with your mouse. On Android devices, you can pick up text, pictures and other supported objects on your screen with your finger and move them to another place in the same app or between different apps that are open at the same time.

It all starts when you touch and hold something on your screen. The phone recognizes you want to move it and then shows a copy which  you are moving (called a drag shadow). As you move your finger around, the phone tells the different parts of the screen that you are just passing over. The action ends when you let go of what you are moving. If you release the object on a place that can accept it (called a drop target), it moves there. Otherwise, it disappears.

The feature can be useful for moving text from a web page to a notes app or pulling pictures from your gallery to a document. You can also drag images from any supported app to Google Drive, where they are uploaded automatically.

You can follow these steps to use drag and drop on your tablet:-

Open the two apps you wish to drag and drop items between in split screen mode. You can do this by opening the Recent Apps screen, tapping the icon for the first app, selecting Split Screen, and then tapping the second app.

Select the text you want to copy. If it's an image, long press it until it floats.

Tap and hold the selected text until it floats and follows your finger around the page.

Move the text to the other app in the split screen view.

Raise your finger to drop the text. It's automatically pasted in the app.

After pasting the text, you can edit it or copy it somewhere else as you typed it yourself.

Which Android applications support drag and drop?

There's no definitive list of Android apps that support drag and drop. However, you can enjoy the feature with Google products like Chrome, Messages, Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Files, Drive, Keep and Photos. The tech giant is working on adding the functionality to more Workspace apps.

Several popular third-party applications also support drag and drop. Samsung apps like Internet, Messages, Notes, and Gallery support the feature. You can also use it between messaging services like WhatsApp, Facebook and Telegram. Almost any software can support the feature if the developer activates it, following instructions from Android Developers.

Which Android tablets support drag and drop?

Google introduced Android 12L to make better use of the screen real estate of tablets. One way the tech giant aimed to achieve this, by refining the drag-and-drop functionality for split-screen mode. Any tablet running Android 12L or Android 13 can take advantage of it. The popular ones include Samsung Galaxy tablets.