Android 15 could soon have a much, much better screen recording system

Android has had a built-in screen recorder feature for a couple of years now, but it’s been fairly barebones until recently. With the launch of Android 14’s second quarterly platform release, the system screen recorder finally added the option to record a single app instead of the entire screen. In the first quarterly platform release of Android 15, Google could upgrade Android’s screen recorder yet again by adding a more useful indicator in the status bar.

When you cast or record your screen on an Android phone right now, the system displays a tiny indicator on the right side of the status bar. For screen recordings, this indicator is a red dot enclosing a smaller white dot with curved white lines around it. For screencasting sessions, this indicator is the Google Cast icon. Both indicators tell the user that some app — either SystemUI or a third-party Android screen recording app using the platform’s MediaProjection API — is recording or casting the screen.

However, that’s all the information we see. These indicators don’t tell you whether it’s SystemUI or a third-party app that’s recording or casting the screen, nor do they tell you how long the screen recording or screen casting session has been going on. You need to pull down the status bar to see the notification from the app that’s recording or casting the screen. You also need to do this when you want to end the screen recording or screencasting session, which could potentially expose more information than you’re willing to share.

Fortunately, Google is looking to change all that in an upcoming Android 15 release. While digging through the latest Android 15 Beta 4.2 release, I discovered code for a revamped screen recording and screencasting experience. After a bit of tinkering, I managed to fully enable this new experience. For starters, there are new chips in the status bar that display the ongoing duration of a screen recording or screen casting session.

The new chips not only provide more information at a glance than the original indicators, but they also allow you to stop a screen recording or screencasting session without pulling down the status bar. All you need to do is tap on the chip to open a dialog that lets you stop recording or casting.

The dialog that appears when a third-party app requests to record or cast the screen has also been unified, as shown below. It now asks you whether you want to “share your screen” rather than “start recording or casting.” After granting permission, a different status bar chip appears than the one that’s shown when SystemUI is recording or casting your screen. This chip tells you at a glance that a third-party app is recording or casting your screen.

Although I spotted these screen recording changes in the Android 15 Beta 4.2 release, I doubt they’ll go live in the stable release of Android 15. Instead, I suspect we’ll see them in the upcoming Android 15 QPR1 release, if not later. There’s no way to tell when changes like these will land, but given that the revamped experience is already fully functional, I suspect we won’t have to wait too long for it to roll out.