Chromecast upon it’s unveiling and eventual release captivated users everywhere because of its streaming capabilities for the living room, the bedroom, or anywhere else you can plug it into an open HDMI port. The HDMI streaming dongle from Google has been a hit ever since, despite its lack of apps with support to stream to your big screen. In the 4.4.1 update however we just might get a taste of something more exciting, that will also make the Chromecast that much more of a valuable piece of equipment, especially at its $35 price.
Inside the 4.4.1 update to Android that rolled out recently, indicators inside specifically hint at a new casting feature that will allow you to mirror your Android devices screen to the Chromecast dongle. This is of course not confirmed yet, but as ausdroid points out in one of Koushik Dutta’s G+ posts, Koush states that he believes the specific lines of code shown in the image indicate this new feature.
In settings and under display, you’ll also notice that the “turn on/turn off wireless display” option has been swapped out for new terminology, and is now simply labeled as “cast screen”. This also of course doesn’t really mean anything, but what would Android be without its speculation? Not to mention Google could just be teasing us with this feature to come by changing the name. They do like to use this tactic to get people excited and this wouldn’t be the first time.Along with these hints within the updates code, and the newly formed Chromecast category inside the device version of the play store, could Google be setting us up to have all kinds of new apps that receive Chromecast support? It does seem a little silly to have a dedicated section within the play store for only 7 apps. Perhaps after the hackathon that Google is throwing for developers this weekend, we’ll learn a little more about what Google has planned for the future of the Chromecast and the apps and features we can use with it. With any luck we might see these new features and apps be Chromecast ready right around the time that the SDK for Chromecast is released. All signs point to a December release, so we could be seeing all these new Chromecast goodies sooner than we think.