Android 16 lets you record what you're doing on an external monitor

Using Android’s built-in screen recorder feature, it’s easy to record the screen of an Android phone. However, if you connect your Android phone to an external monitor, there’s no easy way to record what’s happening on the external display. That’s because Android’s screen recorder currently doesn’t support recording the content of external displays, but that’s set to change in the upcoming Android 16 update.

When I connected my Pixel phone running Android 16 Beta 3 to an external monitor, I noticed that the Android screen recorder dialog now had a third option in the dropdown menu: “Record HDMI Screen.” When I disconnected the phone from the external monitor, the options reverted to the familiar “Record one app” and “Record this screen.”

The option to record a HDMI screen isn’t present on my Pixel running the latest stable release of Android 15, which means this feature is new to Android 16. I don’t know exactly which preview release of Android 16 added this option, though.

The “Record HDMI Screen” option, as expected, allowed me to record what was happening on the external monitor, separately from the phone’s built-in display. The resulting screen recording was encoded and saved the same way as standard phone screen recordings. However, there was one minor difference: the internal ID that Android assigns to the external monitor was appended to the file name. Unfortunately, this new feature has some limitations.

First, the option to pick the external monitor wasn’t available when a third-party screen mirroring app requested to record the screen. The option also wasn’t there when I tried to cast the screen using Android’s built-in Cast tile. Android 16 basically only allows the built-in screen recorder to capture what’s happening on external monitors, which is unfortunate since there are some apps that could benefit from this feature.

Hopefully Google expands this capability in a future Android release. Google is working on a new desktop mode experience called Desktop View, so having the ability for apps to record or cast what we’re doing on external monitors would be useful.

This feature expands upon a lesser-known capability of last year’s Android 15 release: the ability to take a screenshot of external displays. Since Android 15, the OS saves separate image files for every display that’s connected to an Android device. Like with screen recordings, Android appends the ID of the external display to the file name of the screenshot. There isn’t a straightforward way to trigger the Gemini assistant or Circle to Search on an external display, so I’m not sure if similar limitations apply regarding third-party apps and screenshots of external displays.