When you have Bluetooth devices connected to your Android 13 phone, you will see a button on the top right of your media player. When you tap it, a window will pop up showing the connected devices that you can play audio through. You can choose to play audio through the connected devices or through your phone’s speakers. This feature isn’t perfect, as you don’t have the ability to switch devices if your media player is not displayed. This means that if you are playing a game, you won’t be able to switch through your audio devices. Still, this is a very useful feature to have.
The Android 13 audio picker will let you select cast devices
Sometimes, you want to listen to music on devices other than your Bluetooth speaker. There are devices that you can connect to via Chromecast. These include certain smart speakers, Nest hub displays, and other devices. If you want to listen to music on these devices, you’d have to go to their respective apps and select the music or podcast you want to play. However, Android 13 will actually display those devices in the audio picker. This means that if you’re playing something on your Bluetooth device, you’ll be able to easily throw the audio to the cast device with one click. So, if you’re listening to music on your headphones, but you want to throw the audio to your Nest hub in the kitchen, all you have to do is tap the Nest Hub in your audio picker and the audio will go through the hub. This is a feature that will take some time to mature. While we can expect that Google will make this feature available to its first-party devices, it’s up to third-party developers to bring this functionality to the devices. Google is releasing a Google cast SDK and the Android 13 ‘Stream Expansion’ feature. Companies will be able to use these to make the device compatible with this feature. It’s hard to say exactly when you will be able to use this feature, so you’ll want to stay tuned for more updates on this.
