Android 16 QPR2 makes the Recents screen more one-hand friendly (Updated)

Update, December 10, 2025 (02:00 AM ET): The article mistakenly mentioned that Android 16 QPR2 removed some functionality in the Recents screen. These changes are in the Android Canary 2512 release. The error is regretted, and the article below has been corrected accordingly.

Original article, December 9, 2025 (01:56 PM ET): 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.

The Recents screen, if you’re not familiar with the term, is your multitasking interface for toggling between apps, and we’d already seen a lot of little tweaks being prepped for it in Android 16 QPR1. Now with Android 16 QPR2 and Android Canary 2512 upon us, we’re continuing to spot further changes, and the ones we’ve got to share with you today are a mix of good and bad news.

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!

For Chrome link sharing, we actually get a bit of an improvement with Android 16 QPR2 — 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 with Android Canary 2512, 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. These options remain in Android 16 QPR2, but it’s clear that Google has some ideas that it is experimenting with for the future.

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.