Try These Workarounds for Android 11 “Recent Apps” Error
The bizarre Android 11 bug affects an unknown number of users and devices and makes multitasking nearly impossible. Swiping up on your Pixel to bring up its Recents screen or list of apps you’ve opened, you know you’re suffering, but nothing happens.
Good news? Google is aware of this issue and is working to fix it. This information will not help you very much now if you are having problems switching between applications on a faulty Android. Fortunately, there are several workarounds you can try to alleviate – if not fix – this problem.
First, try locking and unlocking your device. This may be all you need to do to get the Recent Apps list up and running again. You will have to do this every time you want to change your application, but this is the simplest solution in your toolbox. If that doesn’t work, try restarting Android to see if it gives you a temporary respite from this annoyance, or perhaps even restart it in Safe Mode and then return to normal.
If not, try switching to a different launcher to see if that fixes the problem. Smart Launcher 5 is a good choice, as is Nova Launcher ; I’m pretty sure I used the latter on my first Android device. (How far have we come.)
There is no guarantee that these fixes will fix the problem with recent applications, but I would not advise you to take any more drastic troubleshooting steps. Instead, you’ll have to launch the apps you want to use from the Android app bar – and you can switch to three-button navigation instead of gesture-based navigation to make this easier. But this is not a “reset your phone and see if that helps” problem. Google should roll out its fix soon enough, although it’s surprising the bug made it into the final version of Android 11 given that users have already reported it in various pre-beta releases.