Vivo X Fold 5 Debuts ‘Atomic Workbench’ Multitasking
I don’t know what it is about Chinese Android OEMs and multitasking features, but we’ve got another new way of jumping between two apps that I absolutely am going to need to see get copied. In a post on Weibo teasing the impossibly thin Vivo X Fold5, we got a glimpse of a new multitasking interface that looks totally different than anything we’ve seen on Android before.
In the clip, you can see a user playing a game while 4 other apps float above the game. This view is reminiscent of Apple’s Stage Manager for iPad and they are apparently calling it something like Atomic Workbench. At a moment’s notice, they are able to tap DeepSeek and it moves into the prime location, with the game joining the other three apps. The floating apps also move to the left side, making things look even more like Stage Manager. You can also notice here that the game continues playing which tells us that these apps aren’t just paused shortcuts. They continue to run in this view.
In this way, they behave like 4 floating windows on screen at once.
Of course, the broader goal of a setup like this is to enable the user to swap between apps rapidly. Recently, OnePlus/Oppo came up with their Open Canvas approach which allows up to three apps to be open at once. The novel move is that apps can be expanded so that they flow 90% off screen. Tapping the little bit of app visible causes it slide over into full view. Once you get used to it, Open Canvas can be very useful. So much so, it seems Google might be set to copy it..
Currently, the two best ways for Android users to quickly swap between apps is to either swipe up and hold to reveal the recents screen and the then tap on the app they had open or just swipe along the bottom of the screen. Option number one is great and it’s usually what I do, but it can be slow. Option number two is also useful, but it has its hangups. First off, once you’ve added a third app to the parade, you’re doing a lot of swiping and things start to feel clumsy. Apps will also often suspend themselves when they’re out of view. For instance, Wyze will force cameras to reconnect and reload after being swiped out of view.
With Open Canvas, neither of these things are issues. This new Atomic Workbench feature should also avoid these issues while approaching things from a very logical perspective. If you’re used to just swiping along the bottom, what do you do if you need to swipe back to an app that was open three or four apps ago? You swipe, swipe, swipe.. Here, you just reach up and tap the app. This also contends with the fact that you’re really only ever doing one thing at a time, so rapidly swapping between apps in a target way usually makes more sense. Sure, there will be times when having two apps side-by-side will be preferable - for instance if you’re referencing one app while imputing text in the other - but often, Atomic Workbench might just be perfect.
Even if Apple mostly thought of it first.