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Microsoft is Preparing To Test Android App-Mirroring on Windows 10 (zdnet.com)
Microsoft showed off the ability to mirror applications running on an Android phone to a Windows 10 PC last fall. Windows Insiders could begin testing this feature as soon as this week. From a report: MSPoweruser reports that the Android app-mirroring feature initially will be available on certain Android phones running Android 7.0 or greater, specifically the Samsung Galaxy S8, S8+, S9 and S9+. Supported Windows 10 PCs need to have the "Bluetooth radio supports Low Energy Peripheral Role" on their systems in order to get the app-mirroring feature to work. Users will need to have Microsoft's Your Phone app installed for the feature to work. Only Windows Insiders running the latest test builds on certain devices will be able to test app-mirroring at first.The app-mirroring feature potentially could be available to Insiders as soon as this week.
Miracast has been mirroring Android apps since 2012. To Windows or almost any TV. How is this remotely new or innovative?
Miracast was added as standard in Android 4.2, and then removed again in Android 6. Only some phones support it now.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You see, Win10 is huge step for Windows. For ages they were trying to cram a full desktop UI into the tiny 4 inch screens, without keyboard. Then, they turned around and slapped a UI designed for 4 inch screens on the 24 inch desktop.
With App mirroring the full power of stretching a 5 inch UI over 24 inch display will be totally apparent.
Right now Microsoft is busy implementing a gesture UI for their minitowers.
After that they will think of doing something about the swipe control using a three button mouse.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Yeah because when they own your desktop computer your biggest concern is that they may also own your toy phone.
Technically it's still there, just disabled by a switch in the Android settings. Unfortunately you have to root your device to turn that setting back on (in build.prop, change persist.debug.wfd.enable=0 to 1).
Miracast is an open standard, so there's no licensing cost associated with it. As best as I can tell, Google disabled it for performance reasons. Like Steam In Home Streaming, Miracast works by encoding everything showing on the device's screen in real-time into a h.264 stream, then streaming that to another device. To the other device, it's like it's playing a streamed movie. Unfortunately this requires quite of bit of power on the Android device doing the encoding (even though the encoding is done in hardware on the GPU), causing battery life to plummet to a few hours. This led to unfavorable comparisons with iOS devices, which don't really mirror the screen, they just redirect things like the incoming video stream from the phone to your TV. So it seems Google disabled it so the ignorant masses would stop comparing screen mirroring with stream redirection, and incorrectly claiming iOS was better at it.
Which makes me wonder how exactly Microsoft is going to pull off app mirroring. If they're going to write their own Android app which implements Miracast or their own proprietary version of it (like Remote Desktop), that may actually be a good thing. Apps on other devices can then be written to be compatible with the Microsoft app (like Windows SMB file sharing has become standard via SAMBA making compatible clients available on all other computer platforms). And people without rooted devices will have a way to mirror their screen to their TV again.