Chrome OS may soon support mirroring your phone’s screen

Google has been working on a new Phone Hub feature for Chrome OS over the last few months. The feature was first spotted back in September last year as a new feature flag on the Chromium Gerrit. The flag had revealed that the Phone Hub would provide deeper integration between Chrome OS and Android devices, allowing users to access notifications and controls their phones right from their Chromebooks. Earlier this month, the feature went live for some users running Chrome OS 90 on the Canary channel, and we learned more about its capabilities.

So far, we’ve learned that the Phone Hub feature will let users enable their phone’s hotspot, enable DND mode, locate their misplaced phone, sync Chrome tabs, sync notifications, and reply to them right from their Chromebook. Now, a recent report from 9to5Google suggests that it may also let you mirror your phone’s screen. The report points at a new flag — #eche-swa — that is currently in development. It claims that this flag enables a System Web App (SWA) version of “Eche,” which presumably means “throw” or “cast” when translated from Spanish to English. This suggests that the SWA will let users cast their phone’s screen on Chrome OS devices.

The report further talks about a snippet that highlights what the #eche-swa flag is supposed to do. It states: “Implements the core logic of the EcheApp which is a SWA to transmitting video and bidirectional data over WebRTC.” This suggests that Eche “is an app related to a video feed being broadcast over WebRTC — the same tech used by numerous realtime video apps including Google Duo — along with some other “data” to be sent back and forth between two devices.”

The new feature will essentially let users cast their phone’s screen to their Chromebook upon clicking a Phone Hub notification, much like the functionality offered by Microsoft’s Your Phone app for Windows 10. It’s worth noting that the feature will most likely be limited to Google’s Pixel devices at launch, as the Javascript for the Eche app is included in a Google source code folder that appears to be specific to Pixel phones.

It’s worth noting that Phone Hub’s screen mirroring feature is currently in its early stages of development, and we don’t have any information regarding a launch schedule. 9to5Google speculates that if it is a Pixel-exclusive feature, it’s possible that Google may launch it as part of its quarterly Pixel feature Drops. We’ll update this post as soon as we learn more about the feature.

The post Chrome OS may soon support mirroring your phone’s screen appeared first on xda-developers.

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