Microsoft is probably not the first name you think of when you think Android. That has not stopped them from working really hard to become synonymous with the platform. For the most part, Microsoft’s offerings have been more business oriented and squarely aimed at the corporate or self-employed professional. How many people in everyday life need Word or Excel on their phones? Anyhow, some stuff they release is great for everyone with an Android phone. Such as Cortana and Bing Search. Now we can add Clip Layer which improves copy and paste on Android phones–I know, wow. Thanks, Microsoft.

First, Clip Layer does one big thing here that makes it stand out from the standard offerings by Google and the cell phone makers. It can read all of the text on your screen and let you copy multiple sections in one session. For many people that do a lot of research on their phone, this can be an amazing feature. No more highlight this section, copy and paste it to Word–or another text editor–then back to the first app to copy another section, and repeat. Now you can do several sessions of copy and paste in one run. If you have never done a lot of copy and paste on your phone, then you probably don’t see what the big deal is. For those of us that do, though, Clip Layer is a great piece of software to have installed.

There are some tradeoffs in using Clip Layer, though. You lose access to your app that is linked to long pressing your home button. For me, this is no big deal but, for many, I can see this being a deal breaker. Just know that before you install Clip Layer.

Clip Layer by Microsoft
Genre: Utility, copy and paste
In App Purchases: No
Rated: E for Everyone
Available now on