Discord's screen sharing comes to Android mobile devices, iOS will follow in January

Discord added video chat functionality and screen sharing to its platform in 2017, enabling up to ten users at a time to hang out digitally and share their online activities. That user limit was raised to 50 earlier in March 2020 to help people to cope with the stresses of the COVID-19 outbreak, and today Discord announced that after several weeks of public testing, it's being extended to mobile devices as well.

The new mobile sharing functionality works in DM and voice channels, and is optimized for high framerates and low latency on mobile devices. The screen share feature supports audio and voice chat simultaneously—you can converse while shared audio is playing—and while streams still have a maximum of 50 concurrent viewers, voice channels will support unlimited screen shares.

It's not a revolutionary new feature for the platform, but enabling Discord users to take advantage of the screen share functionality without being parked behind a PC does promise to simplify large-scale virtual gatherings over the holidays—a timely boon in the midst of a global pandemic that will (hopefully) severely curtail in-person gatherings.

Mobile screen sharing will be rolled out for Android users today (and is expected to be completed by tomorrow, December 17, so you may not be able to use it just yet) and will come to iOS devices sometime in the first half of January. Streaming support for tablets is "in the works [and] coming soon" as well.