Android 16 will add handy productivity feature for desktop workers

By Willow Roberts Published March 18, 2025

It looks like Android 16 will add a feature that lets you screen record what you’re doing on an external monitor. This is an expansion of a current Android 15 feature that enables you to screenshot external monitors connected to Android devices.

Spotted by Android Authority, Android 16 Beta 3 includes a third option in the screen recorder menu: “Record HDMI Screen.” It works just the same as recording your device display, encoding and saving the resulting video in the same way as well.

Right now, the feature only works with Android’s built-in screen recording abilities and only works with external monitors — so you can’t record with a third-party app and you can’t record any screens that you cast to with the Cast Tile. We could see this kind of functionality expansion in the future, though.

The ability to screen record an external monitor could be connected to Android 16’s Desktop View feature. This desktop mode will help Pixel phones and Android devices compete with Samsung and Motorola phones which provide a complete PC experience when connected to an external display.

It’s a useful feature for people who don’t have a pressing everyday need for a laptop or a desktop PC. Instead, when you do occasionally need to do a bit of word processing or work on Google Sheets, for example, you can simply plug your phone into an external display and grab a mouse and keyboard.

And with plenty of TVs capable of acting as an external monitor, you could potentially set up a “workstation” for the price of just a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse set — something you can grab on Amazon for as little as $20.