Screen Sharing Android Apps in Video Calls on Chromebooks

By

On your Chromebook you can present the screen of an Android app in a Google Meet or Zoom video call. The trick is to select the app’s window when sharing. In Google Meet, pin the shared window to the screen to see what the app looks like to the guests in the call.

Presenting Celestia for Android in a Google Meet video call on an ASUS Chromebox 3
Presenting the Celestia Android app in a Google Meet video call on my ASUS Chromebox 3.

The same goes for Linux apps. But, if an app opens over one window, you’ll be able to share only one at a time.

Sharing the whole screen with an app open in the foreground works too and has the advantage of showing all the app windows. It’s less practical, though.

Given the limited resolution and quality of video calls, it’s better to maximize the Android app’s window so the guests can view a larger image with more detail. The only downside is most Android apps aren’t optimized for large screens and may have large blank areas and widgets spread wide apart. Keeping the default, non-maximized app window fixes this and can be useful. For example, to view both the call and the app while presenting.

The default window of Stellarium for Android and its screen shared in a Google Meet video call on an ASUS Chromebox 3
The default window of Stellarium for Android (left) and its screen shared in a Google Meet video call (center) on my ASUS Chromebox 3.

If the Android app plays fast animations, Chrome OS won’t be able to keep up even on high-end devices hooked to fast Internet connections. The view in the call will stutter or lag.

What if the Android app you want to present doesn’t run on your Chromebook?

A workaround is to install a wireless screen mirroring app on your Android device and share the device’s screen. I use Screen Mirror, a straightforward and affordable app. The Chrome OS and Android device must be on the same Wi-Fi network. To start a mirroring session, visit the app’s website on the Chromebook and scan the QR code from the Screen Mirror app.

This is likely a short-term solution. Google is working on native screen mirroring as part of the Phone Hub Chrome OS functionality.

Screen sharing is invaluable for demonstrating Android apps in instructional, educational, or business calls.

Popular posts from this blog

Using a Bluetooth Keyboard on Android

By
Image
Two years ago I bought a cheap Bluetooth keyboard from Amazon.it. At €14, it was mostly an impulse buy for exploring mobile typing on the go and in similar settings , such as workstations with reduced desk space. My FREALL 7INKEYBD-BK Bluetooth keyboard. I initially used the keyboard with the Android tablet and smartphone I had, a 7” Lenovo Tab E7 and a Pixel 2 XL. I later repurposed the keyboard for the devices I replaced those with, a Lenovo Tab M8 HD 8” tablet and a Pixel 4 XL smartphone. Despite the simplicity of operation, it took me some trial and error to figure out how to pair the keyboard with an Android device and what keystrokes insert the characters I need, such as accented letters when writing in Italian. Moreover, I realized I never blogged about my experience with the unit. So I’m posting these notes in case you come across the same or similar keyboards. The keyboard The keyboard is a cheap, compact, plastic chiclet unit that comes with a small foldable stand for a ta
Read more

Lenovo Tab M8 HD Review

By
Image
I bought a Lenovo Tab M8 HD , an 8” Android tablet. It comes with a MediaTek Helio A22 SoC, an IPS panel, 2 GB of RAM, and 32 GB of storage. I ordered the device from Lenovo’s Italian online store for €134. In this post I’ll share my early impressions on the device. The packaging box of the Lenovo Tab M8 HD tablet. Motivation The Lenovo Tab M8 HD replaces the Lenovo Tab E7 7” tablet I bought almost a year and a half earlier. After enjoying the Google Nexus 7 2012 and 2013 tablets I left Android slates for several years. My return to tablets with the November 2019 purchase of the cheap Lenovo Tab E7 was a sort of impulse buy. I wanted an affordable Android slate small enough to be compact but with a large enough screen to help productivity . I also figured it would double as an ebook reading device and let me explore the Android ecosystem. The Tab E7 was nice but limited. The screen didn’t have good touch sensitivity, performance was poor, there was a lot of lag, and the screen was no
Read more

Reading PDF Ebooks with Google Play Books

By
Image
Large tablets and desktop screens are the best for reading PDF ebooks and files. However, in my experience, using a medium-size Android tablet and turning on two options of the Google Play Books reading settings provides an acceptable experience . Under these conditions, Google Play Books works better with PDFs than Kindle for Android. The reading options for PDF ebooks of the Google Play Books Android app. This setup is helping me read more PDF ebooks, unlike with my previous tablet, a 7” Lenovo Tab E7. On its small screen, the text of nearly all PDF ebooks and files was still too small no matter what reading options I set. Landscape mode helped little. Let’s see why PDFs require specific reading tools, what my setup is, and how I read PDFs. Reflowable vs fixed-layout ebooks With reflowable ebook file formats, such as ePub and Mobi, reading apps rearrange the text and other content to fit any screen size, much like web browsers do with HTML pages. Text fills the viewing area with a co
Read more