A bubble is a widget that floats on top of other apps — chat-head style. Tap one and it opens into a panel; tap away, or tap its header, and it closes again.
What a bubble holds is up to you. It can be a Tools widget — a named rack of the apps that go together, which is what a new bubble starts as — or a clock, or any widget installed on your device. The same widgets you can put on Home or in Dash work here, floating.
Turning them on
Bubbles draw on top of other apps, which Android treats as a special permission you have to grant deliberately.
Toolrack explains what it is about to ask for before sending you to the system screen: Settings › Bubbles › Enable overlays, then the grant screen Android itself shows.
:::info What the explainer shows you The preview on that screen uses anonymous grey placeholder rows rather than your real apps. Showing readable app names to something that has not been granted anything yet would be a privacy leak in the middle of a privacy decision. :::
While at least one bubble is active, Android shows a persistent Toolrack Overlay Active notification. That is required of any app running a foreground service, and it is also the fastest way to tell at a glance that bubbles are on.
Making a bubble
Settings › Bubbles › Your bubbles creates and names them. A new bubble starts as an empty Tools widget, so the quickest way to fill one is the App Drawer’s long-press menu, which has an entry for adding the app you are holding to any bubble.
Each bubble gets its own look: either a generated avatar unique to its name, or an emoji and a colour you pick.
Changing what a bubble shows
Each bubble in Settings › Bubbles › Your bubbles has two actions under Shows:
Edit opens the settings for the Tools widget inside it — the same dialog as the gear on any other Tools widget, so its name, apps, theme and transparency work exactly as they do elsewhere. It only appears when the bubble actually holds a Tools widget.
Change swaps the widget for a different one, from the same picker Home and Dash use. Pick a clock and the bubble becomes a floating clock; pick a widget from another app and the bubble hosts that, live, updating as it would anywhere else.
You can also get to those settings without leaving the bubble: open it and tap the gear in its header, which takes you straight to that bubble’s own widget settings.
:::info A bubble’s own Tools widget is not double-counted Tools widgets are capped on the free tier, but the one inside a bubble is exempt — a bubble is already capped as a bubble, and charging for it twice would make three bubbles impossible to fill. See Premium. :::
Moving and closing
Drag a bubble anywhere. It snaps to the nearest screen edge when you let go and never rests in the middle, so it stays out of the way of whatever is underneath.
To dismiss one, either drag it down to the bin that appears at the bottom, or simply fling it off the edge. If you fling one by accident, grabbing it mid-flight rescues it.
Getting out of the way on their own
Left alone, a bubble collapses, and then slides most of the way off its edge — leaving a sliver you can touch to bring it back.
This is deliberate: a bubble you have stopped using should stop competing for your screen, but it should not disappear somewhere you cannot find it.
Settings › Bubbles › Auto-tuck turns that behaviour off if you would rather they stayed put.
The Bubbles widget
Toolrack’s Bubbles widget gives you a one-tap toggle for every bubble you have made, so you can switch one on for an afternoon and off again without going into settings. Toggling one off hides just that bubble; the others stay as they are.
Add it to Dash or to the Home grid — see Dash and widgets.
Deleting a bubble
Deleting a bubble removes it and the widget inside it. Apps in a Tools widget are not touched, and neither is anything else on Home or in Dash. The action cannot be undone — Toolrack asks first.
Why these are not Android’s own bubbles
Android has a bubble system of its own, and you may have seen a launcher use it to float arbitrary apps. Toolrack cannot: no public API exposes that to a third-party launcher, and the launchers that manage it are system apps exempt from the restriction.
Toolrack’s bubbles are its own floating windows instead. The practical difference is what floats: a widget, not a running app. A widget in a bubble is live and updates normally, but tapping an app in one launches it the ordinary way rather than embedding it in the bubble.
:::info Where bubbles will not draw Some screens ask Android to hide every overlay on top of them — the system Settings app and the file picker both do. Your bubbles are still running and come back when you leave; they are hidden by those screens deliberately, and no app can opt out of it. :::
:::info Free tier limit The free tier allows three bubbles. See Premium. :::