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Take a look at Google Duo’s new screen sharing feature [Gallery]

With our teardown of Duo 20 in October, we spotted that Google’s video messaging service was working on screen sharing. We have since been able to activate this useful feature that lets you quickly show off something on your phone’s display.

About APK Teardowns: In this ‘APK teardown,’ we enable in-progress features of an application. As during teardowns, we’re able to see various lines of code that hint at possible upcoming functionality. Keep in mind that Google may or may not ever ship these features, and our interpretation of what they are may be imperfect. With that in mind, read on.

Using our usual methods, we were able to activate a screen sharing button on the video calling screen in version 22 of Duo that was released earlier this month. Tapping the button will replace the front/rear video of you with that of your device’s display.

This awkwardly means that the person on the receiving end will see double vision of what’s on their broadcasting until Duo is exited. The sender will be able to navigate their phone like normal, with the only indication that they’re sharing their display coming from the normal screen recording icon in the top-right of the status bar.

User sharing screen

The user on the receiving end will see a circular video feed in the bottom-left corner, while tapping will overlay controls for ending, switching between front/rear camera, muting, and the Google Duo watermark in the top-right corner.

To stop screen sharing, users can return to Google Duo and tap the dedicated button again or more quickly stop the entire call from the Duo notification.

User receiving screen share

Screen sharing is quite a convenient feature for tech support or quickly showing things off. In our testing, the experience was already quite stable and hopefully it will see a release soon.

Dylan contributed to this article


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Avatar for Abner Li Abner Li

Editor-in-chief. Interested in the minutiae of Google and Alphabet. Tips/talk: abner@9to5g.com