Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority
If you want to share your Android phone’s screen content, you have a few options: take a screenshot, cast the screen, or record it with the built-in screen recorder. The screen recorder has been around for a couple of years now, but it’s still fairly basic. Despite receiving a few new features in recent years, it lacks many quality-of-life improvements found in other operating systems. Now, in preparation for Android coming to PCs, Google is working on a major upgrade to the feature. Here’s an early look.
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A (brief) history of screen recording on Android
Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority
Android didn’t have a native screen recorder until Android 11 was released in 2020. Before then, users had to rely on third-party apps from the Play Store or hope their phone’s manufacturer had included their own screen recorder in their version of Android. Since many manufacturers did and the Play Store has plenty of options, most users had a way to record their screen, but these solutions weren’t ideal.
Third-party screen recorders, for instance, are limited in what they can do. They can only record what the system allows, which is why they couldn’t capture internal app audio until Google added a specific API in Android 10. More importantly, these apps can be a security risk, as malicious developers have frequently abused screen recording permissions to steal sensitive information. These limitations and security concerns are why Google finally implemented its own official screen recorder in Android 11, making it available to all manufacturers through the Android Open Source Project (AOSP).
Initially, Android’s built-in screen recorder could only capture the entire display. With the release of Android 14 QPR2, however, it gained the ability to record a single app. Google improved it again in the first quarterly release of Android 15, adding a status bar chip to show the recording’s length and making it possible to stop a recording without pulling down the notification shade.
This year’s Android 16 update, in contrast, didn’t bring any major upgrades, though it did add support for recording external displays. This change, while minor, was a sign that Google was preparing to improve screen recording on larger devices, likely in preparation for Android’s new Desktop Mode, which projects a PC-like interface from your phone to an external monitor.
Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority
As Android makes its way to PCs, Google is revamping the screen recording experience to better suit these large-screen devices, an effort that will benefit not only future Android PCs but also Android tablets.
How Google is revamping Android’s screen recorder
The most visible change to the screen recorder is the replacement of the pop-up dialog with a new toolbar. When you tap the Quick Setting tile, a toolbar will appear over your current screen. While it can’t be moved or resized yet, it takes up less space than the old dialog and lets you see the content underneath.
Current screen recorder dialog in Android.Upcoming screen recorder toolbar UI in Android.
This new toolbar also introduces new options, including a “show selfie camera” toggle. This presumably lets you record video from the front-facing camera while capturing your screen, which would be useful for creating tutorials or “let’s play” videos of Android games.
The toolbar retains the old options for recording a single app, showing touches, and recording audio, though the audio settings have been tweaked. Instead of a dropdown menu, the audio options are now listed as separate toggles, which, in my opinion, creates a cleaner look.
The other big change Google is making is to the post-capture experience. Currently, when you finish a screen recording, Android sends a notification that it has been saved. Tapping this notification prompts you to open the file in a video player app because Android lacks a native UI for viewing screen recordings.
In a future release, Android will add a dedicated post-capture UI for screen recordings, similar to the one for screenshots. Tapping the “recording saved” notification will launch a new screen with a simple video player, featuring a seekbar, a play/pause button, and a mute button. Below the player, you’ll find several options: retake, edit, delete, and share.
Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority
These new buttons are a significant quality-of-life improvement. The “retake” button will be handy for quickly starting over after a mistake, while the “delete” button adds a convenient way to discard a recording without having to find it in your gallery. To prevent accidents, Android will ask for confirmation before deleting. As you’d expect, the “share” button will launch the system’s share menu, and the “edit” button will prompt you to open the video in a compatible media editor.
While not shown in these images, Google is also working on adding partial screen capture support. Strings in the latest Android beta suggest you’ll be able to capture a “selected area” rather than the “entire screen” for both screenshots and screen recordings. There will also be a new, customizable keyboard shortcut for taking a partial screenshot.
Although the code for these features is present in Android 16 QPR2 Beta 3, none are active yet. This makes it unlikely that they will appear in the stable QPR2 release in December. The earliest we might see them is in March with the Android 16 QPR3 release, as they don’t seem to involve major SDK changes. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if Google holds them back for next year’s Android 17 update.
We’ll be keeping an eye on these screen recording changes to see what else Google is adding. Be sure to subscribe to the Authority Insights Newsletter to stay up-to-date on our findings!
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