Summary
- Mobile computing alternatives like Samsung DeX offer a glimpse into a future where smartphones can double as lightweight computers.
- Google may be moving towards merging Android and ChromeOS, potentially expanding possibilities for smartphone-based computing.
- The Pixel 9’s unfinished desktop mode is a version of the idea you can try right now, even if its a little broken.
Not everyone wants to lug around a laptop as their mobile computer. Laptops have never been as light or compact in 2025, but they’re still not as portable as a tablet. Which would be fine if tablet operating systems weren’t such a mixed bag. That leaves an increasingly strange set of options for anyone looking for something else. It’s really just DeX, the feature Samsung offers on some Galaxy devices, that lets you run Android apps in a windowed, desktop-style environment.
That is, unless you know where to look on your Pixel 9. The hidden desktop mode in Google’s smartphones is a developer tool rather than a fully thought-out feature, but it suggests a possible future where your Android phone is a monitor, keyboard, and mouse away from being something like a lightweight ChromeOS machine. Having spent the last few years realizing how much of my work can happen in a web browser, it’s a future I really want.
Related
Can Samsung DeX replace your Windows desktop?
I tested Samsung’s desktop platform on various devices to learn more about its performance and limitations.
The Pixel’s desktop mode is not a replacement for your PC
Its basically unfinished, but you can still try it
It’s important to caveat that the “desktop mode” on the Pixel 9 is unfinished to the point that it doesn’t really feel like a “mode” at all. But it does give you a noticeably different experience than using your smartphone normally. The vast majority of Android phones max out at running two apps side-by-side (or one on top of the other). Having a whole monitor’s worth of space to run windowed Android apps does let you do more at once. It might also make you release the limits of the current design of some apps.
There are quirks to Google’s current implementation, too. For example, you don’t really get any interface to control your experience beyond access to the app drawer for launching apps. It’s also very hard to find your mouse if it’s somehow on your phone screen rather than the monitor you connected to. (Bizarrely, the easiest way I found to fix that problem was opening an app on my phone that doesn’t accept mouse input.) The larger issue, though, is that the Pixel 9’s desktop mode is just not as fully-featured as DeX or even ChromeOS, which mostly puts you in a web browser but can run Android apps.
What the feature does, even in its half-baked state, is give you a glimpse of what’s possible — a world where your phone is also your desktop computer when you need it to be. That remains exciting, especially given the direction Google could be taking ChromeOS. If you’re curious to try the feature out for yourself, here’s how to enable it on your phone:
- Open the Settings app.
- Tap on “About phone,” and then repeatedly tap on the section labeled “Build number” until you see a notification that you’re a developer.
- Go back, and tap on System.
- Tap on “Developer options.”
- Make sure “Developer options” is turned on at the top of the menu.
- Then toggle the following options on: Enable Freeform Windows, Force activities to be resizable, Enable freeform windows on secondary display, and Enable non-resizable in multi window.
- Restart your phone if your phone prompts you to.
- Connect your phone to your monitor to make sure it works.
Even once your phone is connected to a monitor, you’ll still have to unlock your device and quit some apps there, rather than on your monitor.
Chrome OS might be rebuilt in Android
From a browser to something even more flexible
That this desktop feature exists at all is intriguing because Google seems like it might try merging Android and ChromeOS. Android Authority reported in November 2024 that Google was migrating ChromeOS fully over to Android to make software that’s a better fit for in-between devices like tablets. Adding some credence to the idea, Google announced in June 2024 that it was incorporating some of the Android tech stack into ChromeOS.
That this desktop feature exists at all is intriguing because Google seems like it might try merging Android and ChromeOS.
The thinking at the time was that it would allow ChromeOS to quickly adopt new Gemini features, many of which were launched on Android first. But when you consider that the company also reorganized its teams internally, uniting things like Pixel hardware and consumer software like ChromeOS and Android into the same team, it seems even more likely it could all merge together. ChromeOS being rebuilt on Android doesn’t mean that Pixels will get their own version of DeX, but it could make that easier to do. At the very least, it could mean that Google is interested in bringing ChromeOS to different kinds of devices after mostly relying on its partners to innovate new form factors.
A laptop isn’t the answer to everything
But a smartphone has the potential to get close
I’ve always been drawn to things like tablet-only setups or Samsung DeX because nothing about the current way we use computers has felt final. Admitting that I can do a large portion of my work with a web browser and mobile apps really opened me up to the idea of working in a different. The most interesting thing about the Pixel 9’s buried desktop mode is that it makes it seem like it could be possible with a device I already own.
Google will share more of what it has in mind for ChromeOS and Android at Google I/O in 2025, but in the meantime, if you’re interested in exploring what living with Samsung DeX is like, Pocket-lint has dug in to it. And if something more traditional is your speed, you can turn any old laptop you have lying around into a new Chromebook without a lot of work.
