Update [May 18, 2019]: After an uproar from the Android community, Android’s VP of Engineering Dave Burke now says support for scrollable screenshots will be bundled into Android R.
We've added scrollable screenshots to the hopper for Android R and hopefully can land it in that release. Make it so @dsandler 🙂
— Dave Burke (@davey_burke) May 17, 2019
Burke says the team has “added scrollable screenshots to the hopper” with plans of making it part of Android R, an OS that will arrive in 2020. The original post continues below.
I take lots of screenshots for different reasons, but most of them are from Twitter usually for sharing crazy stuff I find on the app with my peers who ain’t on it and won’t just join for some reason. It is the easiest way to share something that I have my eyes on.
Screenshots are great and all, but not always tidy. You can end up with lots of them in the gallery. This is because in cases where what you want to share is pretty long, you are forced to capture two or more screenshots, making it hard to follow the conversation since they get easily mixed up while sharing them.
Luckily, many Android vendors already have a workaround for this – scrollable screenshots. With this feature, you can capture one screenshot of a long conversation instead of multiple files, making it easy for the recipient of the screenshot to follow a conversation.
Whether you have a Samsung, Huawei, Xiaomi or devices from most non-Google vendors, this feature is present. While users of stock Android had hoped Google would add support for scrollable screenshots in Android Q, it appears this won’t be the case.
Users have been making requests for this feature and according to a response on Google’s Issue Tracker, scrollable screenshots aren’t in the company’s immediate plans.
Once again, thank you for submitting the feature request. After following up with our product and engineering teams, the feature request will not be able to be considered at this time.
Considering how useful this feature can be, we hope Google will reconsider this decision and include it in a future version of Android. Meanwhile, you can check the Google Play Store for plenty of apps that add this functionality to your stock Android device.
Just so you know, it’s not the first time that stock Android is playing catch-up to the likes of EMUI, MIUI and even the new Samsung One UI (formerly Experience/TouchWiz) in terms of little nifty features like the one above. After all, the likes of Dark/Night mode, always-on display, and split-screen came to stock Android after arriving on other Android devices, some years earlier.
