Rita El Khoury / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google Play Services shows evidence of an in-development “App Cast” tool.
- While its full functionality is unclear, it appears able to gather info about remote Android devices and access their installed apps.
- One possibility could be the ability to remotely stream apps from one Android device to another.
Google’s always working on something new for Android, and we spend a fair amount of time digging through app and system updates in the hope of getting an early look at some of those developments. When we’re lucky, evidence is abundant and we’re able to easily infer what Google’s up to. Other times, however, it’s a bit harder to get the full picture of what Google might be working on — even when it seems clear that developers are definitely up to something. And today, we’re finding ourselves much more in the latter camp.
An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
We’re looking at a recent update to Google Play Services, and as you may know, this software is how Google implements a lot of system-level functionality in Android — like we looked at just last month when we spotted new device backup settings. This time we’ve been crawling through the 25.24.31 beta release, and have spotted evidence of a new “App Cast” feature.
We see references to App Cast popping up in code related to multi-device sync. We’ve also identified a number of text strings that appear to have been added in preparation of App Cast support:
Code
Starting app cast for package %s
Fetching app list from remote device.
Unable to get icon: %s not found
Starting cast session for ' ' from '
Launching '%s' on remote device '%s'We haven’t been able to surface a UI for App Cast, and so we can’t see any of this in action, but one possibility could involve Google giving Android devices the ability to stream apps installed on other hardware linked to your account. We can tell that there are elements in place for choosing devices from a list, and showing a progress bar. And as mentioned in the strings above, we see code for pulling up a list of installed apps.
Admittedly, the need for an app streaming mode feels a little narrow — in a lot of cases, it seems easier to just install the app on multiple devices — but we can appreciate times that require access to data that lives on a specific phone or tablet. We also wonder if this casting might extend to bigger screens, letting you view Android apps from your phone on Google TV.
But as we said, right now we just don’t have enough of the puzzle to really say with any kind of certainty what Google is building here; this is all vibes at the moment. We’ve also spotted work in Play Services on some manner of new notification sync support that appears in proximity to some of this App Cast stuff, but we’re not sure if that’s just a coincidence, or if they’re really meant to be related.
That’s a little frustrating, but we’ll keep digging into future Play Services builds in the hopes that we can soon nail down Google’s intentions for App Cast.
