- Android 15 adds a new touchpad gesture called tap dragging.
- Tap dragging lets you drag and drop objects by tapping the touchpad and then immediately putting your finger back on the touchpad and moving it.
- The feature was quietly added in the Android 14 QPR3 release.
If you compare Android to operating systems like Windows or macOS, it’s immediately clear where Android shines and where it struggles. Android doesn’t handle large-screen devices like laptops nearly as well as desktop-oriented OSes. Google is slowly trying to fix that, though. In this year’s Android 15 update, for example, Google has improved touchpad support by adding a new gesture that could help some users with dragging and dropping items.
When you connect a gesture-compatible touchpad to an Android tablet running Android 15, you can access Android’s touchpad-specific settings by navigating to Settings > System > Touchpad. Here, you can customize individual touchpad navigation gestures, toggle tap to click, toggle reverse scrolling, toggle bottom-right tap, and change the pointer speed. These options were introduced in Android 14 alongside the Touchpad settings menu itself, but in June’s Android 14 QPR3 release, a new “tap dragging” option was added as well.