Can Android 7.0 Nougat save the Pixel C?
One year later: Can Android 7.0 Nougat save the Pixel C?

            
  
  
  
    

    

    
      Google throws Pixel C users a bone with split screen, but still neglects tablet basics.
    

    

    
            
              
            
          

    
  



  

  
      
    
    
                      
                      
          
The Pixel C tablet has had a tough life. Under its code name of "Ryu," the Pixel C started life in the Chrome OS open source repository, seemingly indicating that at one point it was meant to run Chrome OS. Google was experimenting with a touchscreen interface for Chrome OS to the point that an on-screen keyboard (which is mostly useless on a laptop) shipped in the stable version. A finished version of an "all-touch" Chrome OS never materialized, though, and we ended up with a Pixel C running regular Android 6.0 Marshmallow.
The result was a "productivity" device that couldn't multitask. You could type like a champ with the Pixel C's keyboard, but the one-app-at-a-time nature of Android made things like referencing information while typing pretty much impossible. The Pixel C was all the more disappointing because we knew a split screen mode was coming—a "highly experimental" version of the feature debuted in Marshmallow's developer preview.
Split screen wasn't ready for the Pixel C's launch, though, which just fueled the feeling that the C was a half-baked device with software that wasn't ready for the hardware it was running on. There were other bad signs, too—the tablet had a whopping four microphones on top, which seemed to indicate it was built for some kind of killer voice recognition system, but it didn't even support always-on Google voice commands at launch.
In a Reddit AMA hosted shortly after the launch of the Pixel C, the development team's response to questions was something along the lines of "just wait until Android N!" With the consumer version of Android N—Android 7.0 Nougat—finally out, let's take another look at the Pixel C. A full eight months after its release, can Nougat save the Pixel C? What's the status of Android tablets now that split screen has arrived? Is Android really ready for a device with a hardware keyboard?

          
                      
                  
                    
        
          
    
    
          
          
We're still not sure about hardware issues
This is my third Pixel C. The first tablet had countless connection problems between the keyboard and tablet, and shortly after the review, we received a replacement unit that performed much better. After a few months of ownership, unit #2 started randomly rebooting after a security update. Some long threads in the official Google forums get into this, so mine wasn't an isolated case.
Numerous OTAs arrived and even the N developer preview, but the random reboot problem never went away. It was later discovered that the only way to fix the random reboot problem is to have the hardware replaced. I ignored this and manually updated the Pixel C to the final version of Android 7.0 Nougat, and it promptly died, refusing to boot past the recovery screen.
Time for replacement #3! So far, things have been fine.
Do Android tablet apps still suck? (Spoiler alert: Yes)

    

    The Ars Technica Facebook page on the Pixel C. A shockingly-high number of apps does not support landscape mode in some or all of the interface, which is the primary orientation for the Pixel C.
                
  

The established wisdom is that the app situation on Android tablet is awful, but I hate repeating the established wisdom year after year without at least checking in on things once in a while. So let's investigate.
In the year 2016, do Android tablet apps still suck? To answer this, I installed the top 200 apps on the Pixel C and gave them all a quick test drive. I looked at apps only—not games—using this "Top Apps only" Play Store list. The idea is that games scale just fine on tablets; it's apps that are the challenge.
Of the top 200 apps:

Nineteen were not compatible with the Pixel C
Sixty-nine did not support landscape at all
Eighty-four were stretched-out phone apps
Twenty-eight were, by my judgment, actual "tablet" apps

That there aren't many tablet apps isn't a surprise to most people. What was a shock was the lack of landscape support in so many apps. More than 33 percent of the top 200 were all portrait, all the time, and many more (even some Google apps) had interstitials and other single screens that didn't support landscape.

          
                  
                    
        
          
    
    
          
          
Android apps are primarily used on phones, which are primarily used in portrait mode. The Pixel C primarily lives in landscape mode, though—the cameras, physical buttons, microphones, and speakers are oriented with the expectation of landscape, and the device must be in landscape in order to use the physical keyboard. When compared to the phone market, this is a very rare configuration that creates a problem in apps that most people won't notice.
Most of the "phone" apps fall into three categories on a tablet: there's the dreaded stretched-out app, which makes no layout considerations for a tablet. Then there are the "Card" apps that hope to scale well on tablets by sticking everything into a card container, which then just gets slotted into a grid that fits your screen. There's also the "pillar box" app, which puts big margins on the left and right side of a phone app, relieving a bit of the "stretched out phone app" problems. But none of these apps are more powerful on a tablet the way a multi-pane, tablet-native app is.
One of the best tablet app makers in the top 200 is Microsoft. Seeing why is easy. Google's design methodology is to view tablets as big phones, but Microsoft views them as tiny desktop computers. As a result, you get killer versions of Word, Excel, Outlook, and Skype, with information-dense, multi-pane layouts.

Side-by-side phone apps aren't bad, but need updating
So while the experience of Android on a tablet is still one made up of apps with phone-centric layouts, running two of these apps side by side isn't too bad. Cut the Pixel C screen in half and you get two tall, skinny app areas that are very close to a phone. The layouts work, you can multitask, and everything feels natural. Your tablet goes from running one giant app at a time to being two smartphones duct taped together.

          
                  
                    
        
          
    
    
          
          
The biggest problem with split screen on the Pixel C is the same one we pointed out in our general Android review: developers haven't specifically updated their apps to be compatible with split screen. This often results in apps being visible on-screen, but not updating. When you have two apps open side by side, only the app you touched last counts as the "foreground" app. In past versions of Android, only one app was visible on-screen at once, so how apps responded when they weren't at the top of the app stack didn't matter—no one could see them.
Now that you can see more than one app, developers need to account for being the "secondary" on-screen app—you aren't the "foreground" activity, but you still need to keep the UI running. Most apps don't account for this yet, so the second you tap from the left app to the right app, the left app stops updating some or all of its user interface. This kills a lot of split screen use cases that would be great on a tablet. Here at Ars' virtual HQ, having Slack open on one side of the screen while writing an article on the other side would be great. But Slack won't update the UI with new chat messages unless you're interacting with it. Right now, I don't see new messages while I'm typing in another window. I have to periodically tap on Slack to make it the foreground app, which updates the UI with a flood of messages I missed while I was typing. Thanks to the lack of developer support for split screen, we haven't gone to two active applications on-screen. We've gone from one active application and one frozen screenshot.
Android's core tablet interface peaked in Honeycomb

    

    This right here, 2011's Android 3.0 Honeycomb, was as good as Android tablet interfaces ever got.
                
  

When you aren't in split screen, Android tablets are still a mess, especially when it comes to the core user interface created by Google. Let's just say it: the tablet Android interface peaked in Android 3.0 Honeycomb. Honeycomb was the first time—and it seems like the last time—that a designer sat down and said "What is the best possible tablet layout for this app?"

          
                  
                    
        
          
    
    
          
          
In Honeycomb, Google introduced a system UI interface that combined the navigation and status bar into a single bottom bar, which made the UI seem designed around two-handed tablet use. The navigation buttons were in the bottom left corner where they could be used by your left thumb, and the notifications were in the bottom right where they could be accessed by your right thumb. Recent Apps had a custom tablet interface, too, with a list of small, scrollable thumbnails that were designed for a larger screen. Dual-pane layouts were the standard, with a new "Fragments" API that allowed developers to recycle their phone layouts by placing multiple layouts on-screen at once, like an e-mail inbox view on the left and a message view on the right. Google even experimented with more powerful apps that allowed you to do more with a bigger screen, like with Honeycomb's built-in movie editor, designed from the ground up for tablets.
Since Honeycomb's initial launch, Android tablet layouts have seen regression after regression, as "What is the best possible tablet layout for this app?" has given way to "Now that the phone layout is done, if we have time maybe we'll add bigger left and right margins for tablets." The tablet System UI layout was replaced with a blind port of the phone UI. Ditto for Recent Apps, which shows as much information on a 10-inch screen as you'd get on a 5-inch smartphone, because it's the exact same UI. The Play Store, Contacts, Settings, and Google Talk/Hangouts lost their dual-pane tablet UI. Now they're just blown-up or pillarbox phone UIs. With their massive screen real estate, the tablet notification panel could be an amazing do-it-all command center, giving you all the context and controls you need to respond to a notification. Instead, it's just a copy of the phone interface. And that group-up design of a movie editor specifically for tablets seems like an impossible task for Google today.

          
                  
                    
        
          
    
    
          
          
Google seemed to care about tablets during the initial launch, but it never followed up with those ambitions. Maybe poor sales of Honeycomb tablets made the company drastically rethink its tablet strategy, with the form factor plummeting down Google's list of priorities. Google keeps producing and marketing flagship tablets, though, and it keeps trying to get away with a blown-up phone UI. Even if you hunt down good tablet apps from tablet-enthusiast developers, there's no fixing the core interface without Google's help. Absolutely nothing in Android is built from the ground-up for tablets. Android feels like an afterthought on tablets because it is an afterthought. There's no denying it.
Klunky Keyboarding

    
              
                
              
                With a software keyboard, you get autocorrect; with a hardware keyboard you have to hope the app supports spell check.
                              
            
                  
          
    
    
      With a software keyboard, you get autocorrect; with a hardware keyboard you have to hope the app supports spell check.

          
  
        
            

The Pixel C has a physical keyboard, which, like "being primarily landscape" and "being a tablet," is another rare feature for an Android device that exposes a whole host of rarely seen problems. A major issue is the default typing focus—when you open an application or a website, the keyboard should automatically be "active" in the text box that makes the most logical sense. Consider how things work on a desktop computer: if I open Chrome and start typing, the letters automatically go in the address bar. This is because the address bar is the "default" input box in Chrome—when you open Chrome, you'll automatically see the little blinking input cursor in the address bar, indicating that Chrome is ready to receive your keyboard input. Additionally you can type in "Google.com" and hit "enter," and, when Google loads, the typing focus will automatically jump to Google's search box.
If you open Chrome on Android and start typing, nothing happens. Well, not quite "nothing"—the refresh button will highlight, because, as the first button in the UI, it has the default keyboard focus. Default keyboard focus usually just doesn't work on Android. Why it doesn't work is easy to understand—for devices without a physical keyboard, setting a text box as the default focus item means the on-screen software keyboard will pop up as soon as you open the app. Most apps like Chrome don't want half of the UI to immediately be covered by the keyboard. Users might want to tap on a new tab thumbnail instead or hit the menu and look at bookmarks, or just read the current page. So no default keyboard focus is set.

          
                  
                    
        
          
    
    
          
          
As an app designer, you always want the physical keyboard to type into the most logical text box. But if a user doesn't have a real keyboard, you usually don't want to immediately show an on-screen keyboard to them. Android doesn't seem to have the tools to separate physical keyboard and on-screen keyboard focus into separate settings. Since smartphone users greatly outnumber physical keyboard users on Android, physical keyboard users get left out in the cold. So with a physical keyboard, most input boxes won't have focus unless you tap or tab over to them.
The physical keyboard also brings up a rare complication involving spell check and autocorrect. Spell correction on Android happens in two places: 1) in the input box, in the form of red underlines, and 2) in the software keyboard autocorrect. The physical keyboard doesn't have autocorrect, since you're less likely to make a typo, but now you're relying on the input box's spell check.
The problem? There are several different styles of text box on Android. Some have spell check, and some don't, and which text box style an app uses seems pretty random. For instance, with a physical keyboard, you get spell check in Gmail, but not in Google Keep. Spell check works in Hangouts, but not in text boxes on Google Chrome or Firefox. This is only a small inconsistency when you also have the software keyboard autocorrect. But when you rely on the app for spell check, it's a bigger deal.

The Pixel C still feels like "aspirational" developer hardware that isn't ready for consumers
The Pixel C almost feels like a purposeful demonstration of the things Android is bad at. It's a collection of very rare device configurations that are poorly supported by Google and the app ecosystem because they are very rare. Try the Pixel C for a few minutes, and you'll quickly find that Android's interface isn't cut out for a large screen, physical keyboard support isn't that good, and Android apps aren't built to work with split screen, or built for tablets, or even built for landscape. As a piece of demonstration hardware, the Pixel C is incredibly useful in discovering these flaws—you can't support hardware with software unless the hardware exists first. You've got to hope people inside and outside Google are dogfooding the Pixel C and saying "See? Look how bad this all is! Fix it."

          
                  
                    
        
          
    
    

        
        
          
          
The Pixel C has been out for a full year now, and progress is slow. Nougat's split screen feature is a great addition not just for multitasking, but specifically because it fixes the problem of no one caring about Android tablet apps. Splitting the Pixel C down the middle gives you two phone-like app areas, which is great because you're going to be running apps designed for a phone most of the time. The wait for split screen support in the OS is over for the Pixel C, and now the wait for developers to fully support split screen has begun. Apps need to be updated to support a live, continually updating UI even if they aren't currently being tapped on. It's more waiting, even a year after release, and I fear the Pixel C hardware will be obsolete by the time all this waiting is over.
There's no telling if this developer support will actually happen, though. Not many developers or companies seem motivated to make Android tablets great, and it all starts at the top with Google. I still haven't seen anything in the core Android UI or in app development that says Google is ready to take tablets seriously.
Expecting a company that sells tablets to also provide tablet-oriented interfaces for the OS and major apps isn't unreasonable. But Google hasn't shown it is willing to provide those interfaces. My Android tablet advice still stands—I'll take Android tablets seriously once Google does.
All the interface regressions since Honeycomb still make Android tablets feel like an afterthought. While the Pixel C is a great demonstration of these problems, it's still not a great productivity device compared to the competition.


          
                  

                  
          


  




  
  
          
  

  
    

    
      Ron is the Reviews Editor at Ars Technica, where he specializes in Android OS and Google products. He is always on the hunt for a new gadget and loves to rip things apart to see how they work. He loves to tinker and always seems to be working on a new project.

    
  



  
    
    
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