Here's exactly what happens when you install ScreenIT on your Android TV and start mirroring a sender device. No fluff — just the actual steps and what to expect at each one.
Open the Google Play Store on your Android TV / Google TV / Fire TV (sideload the APK on Fire TV until our Amazon Appstore listing is live). Search for "ScreenIT" and install. The app is around 18 MB and takes a few seconds.
On first launch, ScreenIT asks for the local network permissions it needs to discover and accept connections — internet, network state, multicast, and the "nearby Wi-Fi devices" permission on Android 13+ so it can read your SSID. Grant them. There are no other prompts.
By default ScreenIT uses your TV's hostname (e.g. "Living Room TV"). You can change this in Settings — whatever you set is what your iPhone, Mac, or Android sender will see in their screen-mirroring picker.
That's it — the receiver service is running. The home screen shows your TV's current IP, the network it's on, and any nearby senders that have already started looking. You can press Home on the remote and the receiver keeps running in the background.
Swipe down from the top-right corner to open Control Center. Tap Screen Mirroring. Your TV's name (the one you set in Settings) appears in the list — tap it. Mirroring starts within a second or two. To stop, open Control Center again and tap Stop Mirroring.
Click the Control Center icon in the menu bar → Screen Mirroring. Pick your TV. macOS gives you the option of "Mirror Built-in Display" or "Use as Separate Display" — both work; the second turns your TV into an extended monitor.
The first time a particular device connects, ScreenIT shows an "Allow this device?" prompt on the TV. Use your remote to accept (and optionally tick "Always allow this device" so it doesn't ask again). After that, the same device connects instantly.
Full-screen mirror of the sender device's display, with optional stats overlay (bitrate, latency, fps) in the corner. Audio plays through the TV's speakers. Press the back button on the remote at any time to bring up an "End stream" confirmation.
ScreenIT advertises itself over mDNS / Bonjour (the same discovery protocol AirPlay uses), so any AirPlay-capable sender on the same subnet picks it up automatically. When a sender initiates a connection, the AirPlay handshake establishes an encrypted control channel, then a separate media channel carries the H.264-encoded video and AAC-encoded audio frames in real time.
The receiver decodes those frames using the device's hardware video decoder (MediaCodec on Android), pushes the decoded frames straight to the surface, and outputs audio through AudioTrack. End-to-end latency on a healthy 5 GHz Wi-Fi network is typically 20–40 ms — perceptually instant for desktop mirroring and usable for most casual gaming.
None of this traffic leaves your local network. There is no relay server, no STUN, no TURN, no cloud component.
Three things to check, in order:
If the device is in the picker but the connection fails, check the FAQ for protocol-specific tips, or open an issue on GitHub with the log output from the stats overlay.