The fact that phones haven’t been able to to this easily/natively/what have you is wild. Similarly, the fact that you can’t use old tablets as external monitors without, in my experience of quite a few, significantly buggy software that’s got significant lag in the best of times, is pretty wild. Sure, the technical hurdles aren’t small, but damn.
I’ve got a reasonably high end newish tablet (Galaxy S7+) that I can use miracast to use wirelessly as an extra PC monitor. It works quite well… if I’m near to a high quality new router. But can I just plug the tablet in and use it as a monitor with my laptop? Not remotely well.
It’s been a year or two, maybe I should check for new software again.
I hate that this is only just now coming in Android 14. I have old phones I would love to be able to set up as webcams for 3D print monitoring, but of course they haven’t been updated in years and will never get this feature.
The real blocker here is the kernel must be compiled with UVC support, which is only enabled by default on many devices since Android 12. Custom ROM could enable this on older android devices, but I doubt it’ll happen because custom ROM usually reuse the device’s kernel instead of compiling their own version of kernel.
there are many apps that will let you do this. I use an app called IP Webcam
I hope we’ll see more of this as USB type C DisplayPort Alt Mode catches on.
You can plug an iPad to a MacBook via usb c and use it as an external monitor and it works really well in my experience. Kinda makes me wonder if there isn’t a patent somewhere preventing it from wider use.
Yeah it does, but definitely not as well. I’ve had much better results with the USB connected directly.
