CyanogenMod sticks AirPlay in Android, awaits an angry army of lawyers at their front door

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Published 9 Oct 2013

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Koushik Dutta, one of the 17 geniuses now working at CyanogenMod, has done something that’s going to make Apple pretty angry. He’s somehow managed to install an AirPlay server on an Android device. Wait, what?! Yes, you read that right, an AirPlay server on an Android smartphone. What can he do with said server? Mirror his phone to an Android tablet, with nearly zero lag.

Why would anyone want to do this? It’s CyanogenMod, so logic doesn’t apply here. The question is why not do this? Screen sharing technology has always been gimped in one form or another. Microsoft’s RDP protocol, in my mind, is one of the best implementations out there of remote screen technology, but then again it’s limited to Windows, which makes it useless. There’s also VNC, but in my experience it’s always been a buggy mess.

Will Apple try to shut down CyanogenMod? If they stick AirPlay inside CyanogenMod, then they’ll probably get an angry letter in the mail telling them to cut this shit out, but that’s assuming Koushik would actually get approval from his fellow colleagues to continue on this little side project.

The real important thing to highlight here is how Apple got AirPlay so right, while everyone else can’t seem to figure out how to do something as simple as show a picture that’s on your phone on the big television in your living room. Where’s Google’s AirPlay? Miracast? Really? Who uses Miracast?

No one.