Summary
Every major Android update brings new stuff, and with that, it also makes a bunch of once-essential apps pointless. It’s kind of inevitable, really, as Google adds long-requested features. Android 17 is no exception here. It brings so many new features, and a few of them are good enough to make you uninstall apps you couldn’t live without. If you’ve got any of these installed, you probably don’t need them anymore. Floating Apps App bubbles are here One of the most talked about features of Android 17 is App Bubbles. It lets you open apps in a floating bubble over your screen, so you can multitask without constantly opening the Recents screen. Yes, this was already possible before, but only with chat apps like Messenger and Google Messages. With Android 17, you can now do this with any app on your phone. You simply have to long press an app icon and choose Bubble. You can even open multiple apps in bubbles and then switch between them seamlessly. You can keep apps like Calculator and Keep open while looking at a trip itinerary or leave the Calendar floating while looking through your emails. It’s a great alternative to split-screen as it gives apps more screen space. Before this, there was no way to do this unless you had a Samsung phone. Your best alternative was something like Floating Apps, which brought quick access to a calculator, browser, clock, calendar, and YouTube. That’s not necessary anymore because Android does this natively now. XRecorder One less app for your reaction videos If you’re a content creator, you’ve probably used XRecorder or AZ Recorder to record your screen while having the selfie camera feed on top. In fact, it’s one of the main reasons to use a third-party app over Android’s built-in screen recording. Android 17 brings this natively with a feature called Screen Reactions. While starting a recording, you’ll see a new Show selfie camera toggle that overlays your face on top of whatever you’re shooting. You can move that overlay around and resize it freely. And it’s not just a plain webcam box on top of your walkthrough. Screen Reactions actually cuts your silhouette out and places it cleanly over the recording. The only thing is that this only works when you’re recording the entire screen and not a single app. Still, it’s way better than using a third-party app and giving it extra permissions to run in the background and display on top of apps. Kidslox Parental controls don’t need an extra app Parental Controls are no longer limited to Pixel phones. Android 17 brings them to all devices, and that’s a big deal for anyone with kids. They now live directly in the Settings menu, and you can use them to set up screen time limits, app limits, downtime schedules, and block sensitive web results. You can even filter which apps show up on the Play Store with this. You can protect all of these settings with a separate PIN, so your child can’t outsmart you. The other requirement for this feature is that it doesn’t work when you have multiple profiles or features like Private Space or Secure Folder enabled. You need to turn them off before you can set up parental controls. The main point, though, is that this makes apps like Kidslox a lot less relevant. You no longer need a third-party app just to put these restrictions in place. Sure, apps like that still offer extras, like remote screen snapshots and more detailed usage stats, but for most parents, what’s built into Android now should be more than enough. DarQ Dark mode everywhere, finally Dark mode is one of those things you either don’t care about or swear by. If you belong to the latter group, it can be annoying when a specific app you use daily doesn’t support dark mode. That switch from seeing everything in dark mode to suddenly hitting bright light mode is jarring. Before Android 17, it meant you had to use apps like DarQ to get around, which worked, but required root access or Shizuku (an ADB-based service). The other option was to use Android’s hidden “override force-dark” developer option to force dark mode everywhere. Android 17 makes both these unnecessary. Google introduced an “expanded” dark theme that could force dark mode on every app on your phone. Head to Settings > Display & touch > Dark theme and choose Expanded. This forced dark mode may not look great on every app, but the good news is that you can disable this for specific apps. Most importantly, it works better than any of the older workarounds.