About — ScreenIT

Why this exists

I bought a cheap Android TV box for my parents' living room. Their phones (one Android, one iPhone) and laptop are all on the same Wi-Fi, and they wanted to be able to put photos and YouTube videos on the big screen without learning a new app, signing into a Google account on the TV, or fishing for the right cable.

The existing options didn't work. Chromecast requires an account and the receiver-side experience is locked to apps that have integrated the SDK. Miracast on most cheap Android TVs is broken or missing. AirPlay receivers on Android either cost money up front, demand a sign-up, are full of ads in places you can't ignore, or only work for the first 90 seconds before paywalling. None of them were the thing I actually wanted: a free receiver that runs in the background, shows up in the standard picker, and stays out of the way.

So I built one. ScreenIT started as a weekend project in late 2024 and has grown into something a few thousand people use daily. It's still a side project; I work on it because I want it to exist.

What ScreenIT is

An AirPlay receiver for Android. Today that means iPhones, iPads, and Macs can mirror to your Android TV (or any Android device running the app) the same way they'd mirror to an Apple TV. Miracast support for Windows and Android senders is in active development.

The technical core is straightforward: an mDNS service advertisement, an AirPlay handshake, an H.264 / AAC media pipeline, and a hardware-accelerated decoder feeding into a SurfaceView. The interesting work is in the protocol details — making the receiver behave the same way an Apple TV does so iOS senders see no difference.

Principles

Local-only by default. Your screen content does not leave your network. There is no cloud relay, no analytics SDK, no telemetry pipeline. The only things that leave the device are crash diagnostics (optional, off by default) and ad requests on the free phone/tablet build.
No account. ScreenIT does not have user accounts, profiles, or sign-in. You install the app and use it. Premium subscribers are tracked by anonymized purchase tokens, not by user identity.
Free first. The free version is fully functional. Premium removes ads and supports development; it doesn't unlock features that should obviously be free.
Honest about ads. The free phone/tablet build shows ads. We say so on the download page and in the privacy policy. We don't dark-pattern users into upgrading.
Predictable. No A/B tests run on production users. No quiet feature removals. If something changes, the changelog and these pages reflect it before the build ships.

How it's funded

Two revenue streams, both modest:

Ads on the free phone/tablet build. Standard Google AdMob banner units. No ads on Android TV / Fire TV. No ads for premium subscribers. Roughly the cost of running infrastructure.

Premium subscription. A small monthly fee (priced via Google Play; varies by country) that removes ads and signals to me that someone wants the project to continue. The number of premium subscribers is small but steady.

That's it. There is no enterprise tier, no white-label deal, no investor. If ScreenIT ever grows into a real business it'll be because that's what users want, not because there's a five-year plan.

The road from here

Loose roadmap, in priority order:

Miracast support. The biggest gap right now. Most Android phones and all Windows laptops use Miracast, not AirPlay. The protocol is open, the implementation is finicky, but it's tractable.
Better network diagnostics. When mirroring fails today, the user is on their own. A built-in diagnostics view that says "your router is blocking multicast" or "the sender's encoder is throttled" would save a lot of support email.
Picture-in-picture and side-by-side. Showing two senders at once on the same TV.
Open Amazon Appstore listing. Sideloading on Fire TV works fine, but the listing makes it discoverable.

Get in touch

If you want to report a bug, suggest a feature, ask about partnerships, or just say hi: contact page has the email. Issues and pull requests are also welcome on the GitHub repo.