Live Transcribe's new dual-screen mode won't work on all foldables: Here's why

At its Made by Google event earlier this month, Google announced the Pixel 9 Pro Fold, the company’s second-generation book-style foldable. Alongside the new foldable, Google also rolled out an update to Live Transcribe that brings a new dual-screen mode for foldable phones. Many assumed this new dual-screen mode would be available on all foldables, but it’s actually only available on foldables from Google and Samsung. Here’s why.

Although nearly every foldable phone has an outer display, many of them don’t provide a way for third-party apps to take advantage of it. Even if they do, it involves the use of private APIs that are only available on devices from a particular brand. With the growing number of foldable phones and the release of its own foldable, Google decided to create a set of standardized APIs that lets third-party apps leverage the outer display of foldable phones. These APIs are available in the Jetpack WindowManager library. Apps that use this library can take advantage of Android’s rear display mode or dual display mode to show content only on the rear display or on both screens.

However, this library cannot trigger the rear display or the dual-display mode if the operating system doesn’t expose the outer display to the lower-level WindowManager APIs it depends on. OEMs must implement the Jetpack WindowManager Extensions module at the system level for the particular version of Android their foldables will run. So far, only Google and Samsung have done this.

As a result, only Google and Samsung foldables can support Android’s rear display and dual-display modes. And since the new Live Transcribe dual-screen mode relies on these APIs, it doesn’t work on foldables from other brands.

In my testing, I’ve confirmed that the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5, Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6, and Google Pixel Fold support Android’s rear and dual-screen modes. I assume the Pixel 9 Pro Fold also supports it, given its mention in Google’s blog post, but seeing as I don’t have one, I can’t confirm myself. Older Samsung foldables may have also gotten support for these modes after updating to Android 14, which is when the dual-screen mode was added, but I haven’t been able to check them. I have confirmed that the OnePlus Open, Xiaomi MIX Flip, and Motorola Razr Plus (2024) do not support these modes. Hence, they do not support Live Transcribe’s dual-screen mode either.

It’s a shame that so few foldable phones support Android’s APIs for rear and dual-screen mode. This means app developers have less incentive to create new features that use the outer display. Hopefully, OEMs will take note and add support for these APIs in future updates, which will open the door to potentially innovative use cases down the road.