Inside Android 11, you may notice a new UI for when you have media playing. In the notification pulldown, there’s now a dedicated section for said media, along with a shortcut to determine where that media is playing back from. We’re calling this the Android 11 sound picker.
Before now, the only output options you’d see are your phone, plus any Bluetooth devices you have connected. Confirmed this week, we can soon expect Chromecast and Nest Home devices to show up there, just as soon as apps start supporting it.
According to Ron Amadeo on Twitter, individual apps can support this sound picker, but they’ll need a “version of the mediarouter library that isn’t out of beta yet.”
This change will make this section of Android 11 much more useful. Being able to control volumes and playback devices from a single interface will be nice.