An issue surrounding casting content to an Android TV device from a Google Home speaker now appears to be fixed.
Google has not officially confirmed the fix, but a number of forum users do state the fix has been applied. After some brief testing, Android Headlines can also confirm the issue seems to have been resolved.
This has proven to be an awkward issue for Android TV device owners as the problem was not an organic one in the sense that an update was rolled out and broke the feature.
Instead, the ability to cast in this way was intentionally disabled by Google as a means to ensure a security vulnerability was no longer in play.
Back in early March, a user noted that when accessing the Google Home app and specifically the “Linked accounts” section related to an Android TV device, the app would display some details of other users along with the device owner’s details.
This led to confusion and misreporting by some over whether the photos stored in Google Photos of those unknown users could be seen on a different user’s device – that was never the case.
However, the bug did lead to Google opting to remove the cast feature as a precaution to ensure if it was possible to cast content belonging to other people on a device, the option was disabled.
The downside of this precaution is that it also removed the option to cast pretty much anything from a Google Home unit to an Android TV device, including YouTube.
To be clear, this issue was specific to voice commands given to a listening device equipped with the Google Assistant, such as the Google Home line and Assistant-enabled smart displays.
Users have always retained the ability to manually cast content from a smartphone to an Android TV device.
It is this particular voice command aspect that now looks to be resolved with users once again able to issue instructions to a Google Home unit to cast content, and have that content cast.
For example, if a user tells a Google Home device to “Play Android Headlines on YouTube on Living Room TV,” the Google Home device would have either not complied at all, or tried to resulting in an error.
It’s worth noting that other users on the same forums have stated that the issue is still in effect for them.
Due to the lack of official communication from Google on this, it remains to be seen when exactly the issue was fixed.
Users started reporting the return of the feature over the last two days and therefore it could be the case the update that fixes the problem is still in the process of rolling out.
Location may also prove to be a factor in this case.
So far users have reported the ability to cast YouTube, Pandora, Spotify, Google Play Music, and Google Play Movies, but not Netflix.
Netflix in particularly has proven to be a bit of an ongoing annoyance in this respect and while the majority of users are reporting it is still not working, a few say it is working for them.
Your miles may vary on Netflix but in our testing it also seemed to work fine.