Android on the desktop: Not really “good,” but better than you’d think

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Android is the most popular mobile OS on the planet, and Google has brought the OS to cars, watches, and televisions. And, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal, Google will soon be bringing Android to yet another form factor: desktop and laptop computers. Re-architecting Android for a mouse and keyboard is going to require major changes to the smartphone operating system, but Android is actually much farther along that path today than most people realize.

We've Frankensteined together a little Android desktop setup using a Nexus 9 and a USB keyboard and mouse to see just how easy—or complicated—it was to use what is still formally a "mobile" operating system in a desktop context today, right now, without complicated changes or reconfigurations. It worked, but Android still has a ways to go before it can be called a real desktop operating system—quite a ways, in some cases.

The biggest affordance Android makes for a desktop OS is that it supports a keyboard and mouse. Any Android device can pair with a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard, and if you want to go the wired route, just about any phone can plug in a mouse and keyboard via a USB OTG cable and a USB hub. Some OEMs even build Android devices with a keyboard and mouse, like the Asus Transformer series, which is a convertible laptop that runs Android.

Mouse support

If you're playing along at home, plug in or pair your mouse with an Android device and you'll get... a mouse cursor! A familiar black arrow will pop up the second you connect a mouse. You can even adjust the pointer speed.

Most interactions treat the mouse as a "virtual finger." A single left-click maps pretty easily to a screen tap—tapping on an app will launch it and so will clicking on it. That's perfect. A few times you'll be asked to replicate a finger swipe with a mouse, like on the lock screen, which means clicking-and-dragging. It's an awkwardness Windows users have had to put up with since Windows 8, and it makes the mouse feel like an afterthought rather than a viable primary input method.

But move beyond "virtual finger" interactions and things get very inconsistent. Take, for example, highlighting text: with a mouse, clicking and dragging across text will highlight it, and there really isn't a comparable single-step action on a touch screen. With touch you usually have to long-press or double-tap on some text, which will highlight a single word, and from there you have a pair of draggable handles which mark the beginning and end of the highlight. Clicking and dragging with the mouse can therefore be interpreted as asking the open Android application to do two different things—highlight text, or swipe, and there's no way to tell which one will happen.

For example: pop open the compose window of Gmail, and you'll be able to highlight text flawlessly with a mouse. Try the exact same maneuver in the inbox, though, and it won't work—Gmail will treat your click-n-drag as a finger swipe and try to move to the next e-mail. In the inbox, if you want to highlight text, you have to long-click on a word to bring up the draggable touch handles. Yuck.

And Gmail is actually one of the better examples. Android's primary word processor, Google Docs, doesn't support mouse highlighting at all. Dragging a mouse across some text will do the exact same thing as dragging a figure across some text: nothing. Chrome won't highlight text in the address bar or on a webpage with a mouse, either—it will switch tabs or scroll, respectively, because that's what a finger swipe would do. It seems that somewhere along the line, Google created a text input box that supports mouse highlighting, and a few apps used that for compose windows and search boxes. Other than a few random input boxes, though, the OS seems to treat click and drag like a finger swipe.

Click right

Let's say you manage to get something highlighted. Now what? The base operating system supports right-click; it's just that none of the OS interface uses it, and there is no system-wide context menu like you would expect to see on a desktop. It would be great if the usual cut/copy/paste menu would show up for right-clicking text, and when right-clicking on a home screen icon, it would be obvious to see options for "remove icon," "uninstall app," and "view app info."

Android's touch interface has a secondary context action that is similar to right-click: the long-press. The OS has moved away from hiding functionality behind long-press, but it can still often be used to invoke some kind of secondary action. Some apps, like Google Docs and the Play Store, even implement context menus by placing a tiny button on the right side of every single individual item (see the above gallery).

You can almost never open these context menus or long-press actions with right-click, though. Most apps completely ignore the secondary mouse button, even though Android makes them capable of catching input from it. A rare exception among the Google-provided apps is Gmail, which will treat the button the same as long-press, allowing you to select several emails at once. Microsoft Word for Android actually flexes its desktop muscle and does great here—you can highlight text with a mouse and right-click it to bring up the (still touch-centric) cut/copy/paste menu.

The final hardware function we have to take a look at is the scroll wheel. For the most part this works pretty well—the scroll wheel scrolls in just about every app. There are a few problems and oddities, though. On the home screen, the scroll wheel flips horizontally through home screens until it gets to the leftmost screen and opens Google Now. Once Google Now opens, it will switch to only scrolling vertically through Google Now cards with no way to scroll back to the home screens. In Chrome, scrolling with a finger will auto-hide the tab bar, but scrolling with a mouse wheel doesn't. You can also press down on the scroll wheel for a "middle click," but Android just treats that as a left-click.

One other oddity you may have noticed in the gifs: the mouse cursor never changes. On a desktop, the mouse will change to the standard I-beam input cursor when mousing over text and a hand with a pointing finger when mousing over a URL in a browser. In Android, the mouse cursor is only ever a black arrow, which removes a lot of the hover context we've gotten used to on a real desktop OS. Android also has button tooltips that pop up when you long-press a button, but these tooltips don't appear on a mouse hover.

Key bored

Connect a physical keyboard to Android, and it will just work. The settings let you pick from multiple keyboard layouts, and an extra button is added to the bottom navigation bar to enable or disable the software keyboard.

Keyboard shortcuts also just work. The ctrl key and "X," "C," or "V" will do cut, copy, and paste, and ctrl plus "Z" or "Y" will do undo and redo. Google Docs supports the usual formatting shortcuts for bold, underline, and italic, and "alt" will bring up the emoji keyboard. Shortcuts even work in Chrome, where F5 will refresh, ctrl+n will open a new tab, ctrl+w will close a tab, and ctrl+tab will cycle through tabs.

The system gets in on the shortcut fun, too. Pressing alt+tab will switch to the previous app, and holding alt after pressing tab will bring up the "Recent Apps" menu. Each successive press of tab will cycle through the app list, just like on a desktop operating system. Esc becomes the back key, and PrtScn will take a picture. The Windows key will even bring up Google Now on Tap, and the right-click keyboard button will open an app's overflow menu.

Really the only button that doesn't work the way we would expect is "insert," which won't switch to an overtype mode. Not that we're complaining. Does anyone use overtype for anything?