Android inches closer to expanding ‘Cross-Device Services’ with internet sharing and ‘Call Cast’

Over the past few months, Google has been working behind the scenes to launch more “Cross-Device Services” on Android to enable features that work across your various Android smartphones and tablets. However, we’ve yet to see the features debut. Slowly, though, it looks like things are coming together.

“Cross-Device Services” technically already exist on Android, with an app of the same name being used to power Chromebook tie-ins on Android. These include app streaming and other linking features between Android and ChromeOS. But, in the background, Google has been working on other features under that same umbrella that work between regular Android devices.

As has previously been found, “Device Groups” in Android would allow users to link multiple Android devices and enable certain features. One of those included the ability to transfer a video call between devices.

Now, things seem to be moving closer to launch.

As AssembleDebug shows off on Twitter/X, Google Play Services is building out (but not yet rolling out) the Cross-Device Services section. This appears within Play Services settings under a renamed “Devices & sharing” section which would appear to replace the existing “Device connections” section.

For “Cross-Device Services,” there would be three features.

“Call cast” is the aforementioned ability to share video calls across devices, while an section for “Internet sharing” would support sharing a hotspot (presumably triggering it from another device) as well as sharing your Wi-Fi password to nearby devices in the device group. There seems to be no limit to how many devices can join a group, at least based on this early demo.

What remains to be seen is when this will roll out. It’s noted that the menu was enabled manually as a part of Play Services v24.06.12, which is ahead of the current stable release, v24.03.15.

More on Android:

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• LumaFusion video editor for Android gets closer to the iOS version with latest update

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