The new media player cards in Android 11 aren’t a feature that’s accessible by default. It’s not hard to turn them on though.
All you have to do is enable developer options in settings and they’ll be one of the new things you can toggle on. The feature in developer options is called Media Resumption. And by enabling it what it does is place cards for your media playback in the quick settings menu.
This alone makes for a nice change. However it gets better because apparently Android 11 also allows multiple media player cards to be displayed simultaneously.
Media player cards in Android 11 sit next to each other
For whatever reason, if you have two media apps open and streaming, Android will show them both in the quick settings. They sit next to each other as giant cards when the quick settings menu is extended.
Only the most recently used card will be displayed in the shorter menu though. In the extended menu, you can easily swap between your different media player cards by dragging your finger back and forth. Allowing you to flip between what you’re listening to.
Maybe half the day you want to listen to music, but then the other half you want to listen to a podcast and thus open a different app.
Presumably this works with any media app. or most of them. We’ve tried it with Spotify and Google Play Music and it works and shows both cards.
It should work with YouTube Music and YouTube as well if you have the premium subscription. As you need that for playback to continue in the background with those two apps. It does not however work with Netflix and likely similar video streaming apps such as Hulu.
Basically if it supports background playback, it should work with this feature. If it doesn’t, it probably won’t.
Google will allow up to five apps to be shown in these cards
According to 9To5Google (via XDA Developers), these media player cards will support a total of five apps.
Should you have that many media apps open and running, even if the media on all of them is paused, as long as you don’t close them out entirely they’ll stay in the quick settings menu.
This should be great for anyone who is always switching between different media streaming services. And it’ll save time as you won’t have to open the recents menu or launch the apps again like you normally would.
Essentially this will add some much-needed convenience for users.