Embodiments of this application provide an application starting method and apparatus, and an electronic device. For any application that is installed in the electronic device and that supports multi-window display, based on configurations of an application layer and an application framework layer in a software system of the electronic device, the electronic device that supports a floating window and split-screen display may have a single-application multi-instance feature. In this way, the Dock triggers any application to start the multi-instance feature of the application, and the electronic device may simultaneously display a plurality of windows of the application on a display in a plurality of window combination forms, so that multi-instance coordination processing and operation may be performed on a same application.