Chrome is preparing to let you take full screen screenshots on Android 12

Google is adding a lot of much-requested features in Android 12, including scrolling screenshots. First introduced in Android 12 Beta 3, the scrolling screenshot feature lets you capture full-screen screenshots, meaning you no longer need to manually capture and then stitch together several screenshots. Google’s approach to functionality is different from how most OEMs have implemented it, and therefore, it doesn’t work in all apps at this time. One of the most notable apps that you can’t take a scrolling screenshot in is Google Chrome, but that’s going to change soon.

When Google designed the screenshot scrolling feature, they didn’t want to follow the same approach that many OEMs take. Most OEM implementations involve automatic scrolling down when capturing individual screenshots to combine once the end of the page is reached, but this can result in poorly stitched images. Instead, the version of Android 12 runs directly on Views, the basic building block of UI components in Android apps. This makes Android 12’s approach faster and more reliable, but also less versatile. Google says scrolling screenshots work out of the box for most apps that use a standard View-based user interface, but web pages aren’t contained in the type of view the feature was designed for. For developers whose apps don’t use a view-based UI or instead use a heavily customized UI, Google recommends implementing Android 12’s new ScrollCapture API to provide the capture system with scrolling information about the view to capture.

This is exactly how the developers of Chrome plan to add support for capturing full-screen screenshots on Android 12. In a pledge submitted to Chromium Gerrit, Chrome engineers prepare to add the catch. Support for Android 12 ScrollCapture API.

The code implements the ScrollCaptureManager class to provide rendered snapshots of the active tab to use for a long screen capture. Chrome provides tab snapshots using Paint Previews, which are essentially snapshots representing visual content on a web page. Paint previews are the key to Chrome’s Freeze-Dried Tabs feature, which shows an interactive preview of a tab while the actual tab loads in the background.

However, you will not be able to take full page screenshots of each web page. The feature apparently doesn’t work for AMP at this time, and the developers also believe it doesn’t work on pages with multiple scroll regions. However, it is possible that these issues will be resolved before the feature goes live in Google Chrome.

After the commit is merged, scroll capture support will be locked behind the “scroll-capture” feature flag. Even so, the feature will initially only be available to users running a Canary version. It will then take around 4 weeks for the feature flag to be available to stable channel users and possibly even longer for the flag to be enabled by default. Google previously said it is working to get its scrolling screenshot implementation to work in WebViews, which may require an even longer wait, as the Android System WebView app is updated independently of Chrome. .

Another feature of Android 12 that Google Chrome is adding support for is dynamic theming. This feature is currently functional but hidden behind a feature indicator, so we won’t have to wait that long for it to be available.