The feature could let you switch between playing on your phone, TV, smart display, and other devices.

Mishaal Rahman of Esper says that when you use the audio output switcher on Android 13, Google may soon start letting you choose from cast devices. Since Android 11, when it was first added, the output switcher only lets you switch between media playback sessions on paired Bluetooth devices, like headphones or a speaker.

But a new version of the Google Cast SDK (software development kit) shows that Android 13’s output switcher might be able to handle transfers from local to remote, remote to local, and remote to remote. Rahman pointed out that “local” means a transfer between two Bluetooth devices that are paired, while “remote” means a transfer between two cast devices. Using the audio output switcher on your lock screen, you should be able to move media sessions from your phone to a smart display and back again without any trouble. Rahman posted a demo that shows how this might look. The demo also shows an upcoming “stream expansion” feature that will let you play audio on multiple cast devices at the same time. When Rahman tried out the functionality, he ran into some bugs, so it doesn’t look like it’s ready yet.

For some reason, it was never finished. Back in 2020, Google worked on making the output switcher work with cast devices. But now that Google is talking about the feature in developer documents, it looks like it might finally be added in an update.