Koushik Dutta is part of the Cyanogen Inc team, and is one of our favorite developers. He’s done work on Chromecast and is currently working to bring AirPlay mirroring to Android. He posted on Google+ and he’s demoed this in a short video for us showing Angry Birds running on a smartphone and being mirrored on an Android tablet. It’s pretty cool:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0DgY10iL-c
Koush has Angry Birds running on an HTC One and is mirroring it on a Nexus 10. There looks to be a little bit of lag, but not much. As a proof of concept this is great. Android has long needed something like AirPlay. There may be licensing issues with the app though, so it may not ever make its way into release versions of CyanogenMod. Hopefully the app will be released at some point so we can try it out.
Koush also mentions in his Google+ post that the app could be used to connect an Android smartphone or tablet with a TV using an Android PC stick. Something like Chromecast, perhaps? Koush has already released a mirroring app for Chromecast called AllCast, which Google broke with a Chromecast software update. Google says they want users to be able to stream their local content, but they haven’t backed that up yet. AllCast is still broken and there’s no way to stream local content to your TV using Chromecast right now.
Having AirPlay-style mirroring on Chromecast, or any Android hardware connected to a television, is functionality that users have wanted for a long time. The AllCast app was built in to CM and worked with the Chromecast dongle. It worked well, but Google didn’t want it to exist. They released a Chromecast OTA update that disabled the AllCast functionality and sent us back to square one. Since then, Koush has focused on bringing AirPlay functionality to all of Android, just Chromecast. He’s looking to bring support to AppleTV, Roku, and pretty much any device with DLNA support. There’s not ETA on when this will be released, but we can’t wait.