Both iPhone and Android have music and video streaming technology – AirPlay 2 and Google Cast, respectively. Each technology does roughly the same job, taking a streaming media file from your phone and streaming it to another device, such as a TV. Video, audio, images and screen mirroring are supported on both, so you might think they’re comparable. There are two ways to stream content, and this is where they start to differ. AirPlay 2 mostly streams to your iPhone first and then transfers the content to your desired device via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. Google Cast starts streaming and then hands it over to the host device to fetch the content from the internet. This means that Google Cast needs an Internet connection, while AirPlay can work without it.
AirPlay 2 has two features that Android devices do not have. The first is lossless audio streaming thanks to Apple Music’s lossless update. Another is that multiple listeners in the same space can add songs to the music queue, making it more collaborative than Google Cast, which takes over the audio stream if another device connects.