[_ea1k]

This will only break the user experience if the app happens to have a bad experience in this mode and if the user happens to request to use it in this mode. It is hard to know for how many apps this would be the case.

There is no way that they could guarantee that the experience would be perfect for every scenario, so that left them with two options:

1. Make the feature only work for apps that declare support for it. This would significantly degrade the user experience for some apps that would work just fine but have not been updated.

2. Make it work for everything with reasonable defaults that every app should be able to handle. Leave it up to the user to accept the degradation for the ones that don't (or to just not use those applications in those modes).

From a user perspective, it isn't clear to me that option #1 was the wrong choice.

[ChrisLTD]

Apple went with option 1 for split screen and picture-in-picture video support on iOS, and a year later many major apps still don't support those features. Option 2 is definitely the way to go.

[_ea1k]

I actually agree with this. I implied otherwise due to a typo and now it is outside of the edit window. Oops. :)

[jdmichal]

Along your point, it's pretty easy to reverse the logic on the last sentence and still have it be a sane argument:

> This feature should be turned on for all apps; you shouldn't make every user wait for every app ever made to be updated because three people on the Android developer team made a new feature and were too afraid to break things, so they turn it off by default for legacy (pre-Nougat targeted) apps.

EDIT: I should read the whole thread before posting. GrinningFool made the same argument:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12338639

[_ea1k]

I was very confused until I realized that I had a typo. I actually meant for that last line to say "Option 2". :)