Google’s got a mix of good and bad for QPR2 Recents screen

What’s worse than Google removing a genuinely useful feature from Android? Well, a few things, certainly, but high on that list we’d have to put “not even realizing the tool existed until it’s already being removed.” And sadly, that may be the case for a lot of you with this neat trick in Android’s Recents screen.

For the past few years, you’ve been able to share app content directly from the Recents screen — if you’ve only been using it to switch between apps, you’ve been missing out. With Chrome, you could easily tap that link icon up top to copy or share the URL of the page you’re on. But maybe the most powerful tool here has been for images, letting you long-press on pictures in apps to quickly open them with Lens, copy to the clipboard, share them, or just save a copy. Compared to screenshotting and cropping, that was pretty handy — if you knew about it!

But with QPR2, that’s all changing. For Chrome link sharing, we actually get a bit of an improvement — at least, if you’re big on one-handed operation. Rather than perched all the way up at the top of your display, the Recents screen’s link sharing icon for Chrome has moved down to the bottom, for easy access:

That, on its own, would be great. But at the same time, Google has also removed much of the old functionality from the Recents screen’s approach to handling images.

Instead of all those useful options we had before, now all you can do is share or copy. Sure, you can pull up Circle to Search instead of Lens, but abandoning the option to save the file locally is a bit of a bummer.

Were you even aware of these Recents screen image tricks in the first place? Will you be at all sad to see them downgraded like this, or are you finding it difficult to get too upset about this removal? Share your thoughts with us down in the comments.