Most android applications (running via ARC on a Chromebook) were designed for a single task/screen, and carry over some legacy limitations because of that. One of them is that they did not need to render output unless they were the active app -- if they were paused/in the background, they were generally not visible.

With Nougat, this will slowly change, as well-written apps will render content even when paused, but there are many older apps.

The problem with the Overview is that it is will restore a minimized window to make it visible in the overview UI. The problem is that for many Android apps this window will be blank since the window isn't activated (which unpauses it under ARC), and was previously hidden.

To support having content for minimized windows, ARC takes a snapshot of the window contents before the app is hidden, and associates that with the Chrome window. But unfortunately restoring the window also destroys this snapshot.

We tried a workaround by not actually telling the Android app it had been restored from a minimized state unless it was also activated, and while that worked (displayed the snapshot in the overview), it led to further issues since the window state was inconsistent.

Recent work with Alt-TAB involved mirroring window content, and doing something similar to support overview mode would seem to be the way to go.