CheapCast is a new app available from the Google Play store that allows your Android device to gain the functionality of a ChromeCast dongle. Currently it’s still in the very early stages of development, so expect a few features to be missing and a bug or two while things are worked out.
What does it do?
CheapCast allows one Android device to control content playing on another Android device over a WiFi network. The content needs to be ChromeCast compatible and currently this includes a short list of tools: YouTube, Netflix, Google Play Music and Play Movies, but this list is sure to grow.
ChromeCast compatible apps all have the same icon, which looks like a TV with WiFi waves coming out of it. Tapping this icon will open up a menu of all handsets on your network that have CheapCast enabled. Select a phone and choose a video and it will begin playing on the selected device.
On the ‘sending’ device, a progress meter is displayed, along with the option to play and pause.
The ‘receiving’ device – the one playing the YouTube clip – has no options for controlling the video whatsoever; it’s just a display to be controlled remotely by the other handset.
What’s the point?
It seems a bit limited at first glance but there are plenty of situations in which it would be useful. For instance, should someone have an HDMI-compatible phone or tablet, you could plug it into the TV and control it with another Android device from the couch.
Even if you can’t connect to a TV, propping a tablet up against a shelf somewhere can be a more relaxed way of viewing content on a larger screen than having it within arms’ reach.
You could even buy an old Android dongle (running 4.0 or up) and install CheapCast on it, effectively giving you a poor-man’s ChromeCast device.
Bugs
Firstly, the app doesn’t support Chrome browser tab sharing, so you won’t be able to control CheapCast from a desktop or laptop until that functionality is added.
Quite often CheapCast just doesn’t work and we can’t quite figure out why. Sometimes it’s a specific service that won’t work (for us it was Google Play videos), other times it worked one-way between two handsets but not the other; we could use a GS4 to control a Galaxy Express but not the other way around.
For both of these bugs the controlling handset would attempt to send out the content and the receiving handset would activate and begin loading. The receiving end would then keep attempting to load for a while before crashing, at which point the controlling end would either notify that there was an error or simply start playing the content itself.
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