We don’t know how it will work yet, though
If the past is any indicator, the first Android 13 previews aren’t due for another month, but features for the upcoming version have already been spotted in development. Among a handful of other audio-related changes (keep an eye on our upcoming coverage today), there’s a new feature that could be coming in Android 13. We don’t know everything about it, but it sounds like it will let you move media between your phone and other devices, potentially like Apple’s iPhones and Homepods allow.
At this point, all we can show you is a UI demo (read: Google’s mockup) for parts of the “Media TTT” workflow — that last bit is for “tap to transfer,” but we aren’t sure if it will inherit that name or branding. The details regarding the feature itself come from an anonymous and trusted source.
Demo of the chip notification the feature will use.
There are several unknowns, and Google may not even have fully worked out how it’s going to work. However, we do know that the feature will display chip notifications with some contextually useful information when a user is playing media on a local media cast sender device (a fancy way to say your Android phone) and it gets close enough to a media cast receiver device (that could be another phone, a tablet, or maybe even a Chromecast or Assistant-connected speaker — we aren’t sure yet).
If you’re too far away from the device, it will tell you to move closer, and it will tell you once you’ve transferred media playback with an option to undo it.
A closer crop of the chip.
Again, we don’t have a complete picture of how the feature might work, so the rest of this is speculation. But, it seems like it would have to use something like NFC or UWB to work with enough resolution and granularity to pick out a specific device from a setting like a gadget-filled room, which could mean there would be hardware requirements for companion devices. The method for media playback will also likely be important, and I would suspect it works via Google’s Casting protocols (and therefore might work with Chromecasts or Nest speakers if it can find a way to detect them reliably), though we have no real proof for that. (For all we know, this new feature could work somehow for non-media workflows too.)
If those assumptions pan out — and this is an “if” given what we know right now — it would be very similar to Apple’s feature on iPhones, allowing you to tap your phone to a Homepod to move media to it.
It’s still early in the development cycle, and features like these could disappear or change drastically before release, but Google is working on a feature to move media between devices in Android 13, and we might see the first bits of it in action in the next couple of months with the first developer preview.
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