Microsoft’s new app tries to fix Android’s copy and paste problem

For an OS typically preferred by power-users, Android has an embarrassing amount of trouble with copy and paste. Sometimes it works just fine, but in other apps you can only copy entire huge swaths of text, or worse – nothing at all.

Microsoft’s new Clip Layer app wants to fix that by letting you copy pretty much any text on your screen. Hold down the home button, and it’ll analyze your display’s contents and let you copy text from areas normally inaccessible.

I tried it out from a few minutes and it could copy most text other than images, though it glitched out while trying to copy text from websites a couple of times. It also defaults to copying entire paragraphs at a time, but you can then select which portion of the text you want to copy from a ‘T’ button on the upper right corner.

The main caveat is that you have to replace Google Now on Tap as your long-press Home button shortcut, but when was the last time you you used that anyway?? If you’re on a Pixel, losing the Assistant may be a bigger deal, but your mileage may vary.

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Via Android Police