Google released Android 12 Beta 3 yesterday, bringing a handful of features and bug fixes over the previous Beta 2.1 of Google’s next mobile OS. In a move to enhance your productivity and make it more efficient, the company has rolled out a new feature to the Recent Apps screen that will help you copy and share links directly without manually needing to locate and select the links from a web browser.
In this post, we’ll explain what this new feature on Recent Apps is all about and how you can use it on your Android device.
What’s new on the ‘Recent Apps’ page?
In the past few iterations, Google has been trying to focus not just on how the Recent Apps screen looks but also on how functional it can be to users. With Android 11, Google brought shortcuts to Screenshot and Copy texts from within the Recent Apps view of an app. Recent Apps is now getting a new functionality – a Link button, that lets you copy and share links from a web browser.
With the new Link button, you can quickly copy links and paste them on other apps. This negates the need for you to manually locate URLs from within a browser’s address bar, tap and hold on it, and then use the ‘Copy’ function. The new Link button saves you these extra steps and gets you the link to a webpage or article you’re reading with just one tap.
The addition of the Link button can be accredited to the Device Personalization Services app which, since Android 11, has used OCR to extract text-based info from within Android apps. The latest functionality builds upon an improved Device Personalization Services app which apparently can detect links within an app.
The new Link copy-share button is part of the new features coming to the Device Personalization Services app on Android. Device Personalization Services takes advantage of optical character recognition (OCR) to get information from texts and images that appear on your screen.
Since the Link button is a new addition to this system app, you should be able to use it on any browser app on your Android device.
We tested the new Link button on our Pixel device across popular web browsers and we can safely say that it works for all of them and not just Google Chrome. You can find the Link button when browsing through web pages on Chrome, Brave, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, and other popular browser apps available on Android.
How to Copy Links from Recents on Android 12
Before you can copy links using the Link button, you need to make sure you have opened the browser app and have a webpage open whose link you want to copy. Now, bring up the Recents screen by using either the Recents key or perform a gesture for it (swipe up from the bottom, hold your finger until the Recent Apps screen shows up, and then lift up your finger).
When the Recent Apps screen appears, tap on the Link button at the top right corner of the browser app’s thumbnail. This Link button will be highlighted in your Wallpaper’s Custom color.
You will now be presented with several options. You can copy the link to your clipboard by tapping the ‘Copy’ option at the top.
When the URL is copied, you should see the ‘Text copied’ balloon appear at the bottom.
You can now open the app you want to share or paste the URL on and paste it there like you usually would.
The new Link button inside Recent Apps can also be used to share URLs directly to people and apps you use on your phone.
Before you can copy links using the Link button, you need to make sure you have opened the browser app and have a webpage open whose link you want to copy. Now, bring up the Recents screen by using either the Recents key or perform a gesture for it (swipe up from the bottom, hold your finger until the Recent Apps screen shows up, and then lift up your finger).
When the Recent Apps screen appears, tap on the Link button at the top right corner of the browser app’s thumbnail.
When you select the Link button, you should get more options at the top. To share the URL of the webpage, select the ‘Share’ option on the top.
This will bring up the Share screen that should pop up from the bottom. Here, you can select any app you want to share the link to.
Additionally, tapping on the Link button will also get you a bunch of suggested apps and people you often contact on Android. These share suggestions will appear at the bottom of the Recent Apps screen when the Link button is tapped.
You can also access the Share menu from these suggestions by tapping the ‘More’ button at the bottom right corner.
Share suggestions also appear when you tap and holding on the Link button inside the Recent apps. When you tap and hold on the option, only share suggestions will appear and there won’t be any ‘Copy’ or ‘Share’ options at the top.
The new Link button on Recent Apps is available as part of the Beta 3 build of Android 12. If you’ve previously enrolled your device on the Android 12 Beta program, then can update it by going to Settings > System > System update and then tapping ‘Check for update’.
The Link button will appear only if you have a webpage opened on a browser app on your Android device. You won’t see a Link icon appear inside the Recent Apps screen if you have no webpage open or if you’re using any other app that’s not a web browser.
That’s all you need to know about copying URLs from Recent Apps on Android 12.
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