In Beta 2, a new launcher flag has been added that, when enabled, surfaces a “save app pair” menu item in the context menu of split-screened apps in the recent overview. Currently, tapping “save app pair” doesn’t work, but when the feature is ready, I’m guessing this will let you add a shortcut to the home screen to launch two apps in split-screen mode.
Samsung & Microsoft already offer this feature in their respective Android forks, but Google implementing it means other OEMs with large-screen devices can inherit this feature for their launchers. We hope this becomes available in time for the Pixel Tablet & Pixel Fold launches!
Google revamped how split-screen works in Android 12 & the OS already internally creates an app pair when you place apps side-by-side in split-screen. That’s why you can relaunch split-screened apps from recent ones. It’s just we lacked a way to save this app pair for future launches.