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According to parks associates research announced at CES 2024, the average American has about 17 connected devices in their household. This could be a Tablet, Watch, Smart speakers, TVs and AR headsets with their connected phones.

As technology advances, we can anticipate a rise in the number of smart devices capable of communicating with each other.

These represent expanded opportunities for app developers and organizations to build a cohesive user experience for their consumers.

Historically, app developers had to cross different hurdles for managing different network stacks, authentication, privacy etc. across devices, which can increase the cost of investing in cross device experiences.

Fortunately now there are tools and technologies that are available for applications on platforms that developers can leverage to advance their app capabilities for building cross-device experiences and ambient computing.

Building cross device experiences does not only result in better user experience for the end-user but also can immensely help with increasing the app engagement metrics. The examples of these features could be users transferring a call from your Phone device to another Phone or Tablet, or sending a notification from TV to your Phone, or perhaps transferring media from your Phone to Watch. The potential for these cross device user journeys is endless.

So, how can app developers develop the cross device functionalities? Specifically, talking about Android there are libraries that Google offers that can be utilized for this.

Cross-device SDK allows users to build cross device experiences that can span multiple devices. This allows app developers ie. the users of the SDK to not worry about internals of the communication, whether the exchange is taking place over Bluetooth, BLE, WiFi or other network technologies, delivering best cross device experience to the end users.

It does offer multiple APIs for Device Discovery, Secure Communication & Multidevice Sessions.

For example application can access the Device Discovery API as following

@Override
public void onCreate(@Nullable Bundle savedInstanceState) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
devicePickerLauncher = Discovery.create(this).registerForResult(this, handleDevices);
}

After getting registering the devicePickerLauncher, this can be then used to launch the device picker dialog

devicePickerLauncher.launchDevicePickerFuture(
/*DeviceFilter=*/ Collections.emptyList(),
new StartComponentRequest.Builder()
.setAction("com.example.crossdeviceaction")
.setReason("Demo")
.addExtra("Key", "value")
.build());

Once Cross device SDK establish connection to the devices and the user picks the device from the device picker list, the users are asked for a confirmation on the receiving device to launch the app which when accepted launches the specific activity with action.

The receiving activity can retrieve the sender device (participant) like the following

@Override
public void onCreate(@Nullable Bundle savedInstanceState) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
Participant participant = Discovery.create(this).getParticipantFromIntent(getIntent());
}

API reference docs for discovery and other APIs can be also found here –

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