Today, Cyanogen announced a new feature to its operating system that it’s been working on for a while now from a company called Nextbit. Nextbit produced is a system-level modification that automatically syncs your applications and games so that you can continue what you were doing on any of your devices.

How it works is pretty simple. Let’s say you’re playing a game on your phone and you also have that game installed on your tablet. Nextbit will sync your game play data from your phone to your tablet. That means you can essentially continue on where you left off, no matter which device you use. It also does this for application data which is helpful if you do a lot of productivity work.

Along with that comes the ability to “shoot” what you’re doing from one device to the next. You could be working on a doodle or a document on your phone. You would then long press the Recent Apps button which would then bring up a list of all of your connected devices. Simply pick a device and Nextbit will open that application on the device you chose and load the project you were working on exactly as it was before.

It’s also worth noting that Nextbit is staffed with plenty of Android veterans including members of the original Android staff as well as additional personnel from HTC, Amazon, Apple, Google, and Dropbox. There are no slouches in this group and that’s always exciting.



The interesting part is determining where this could be useful because it could be useful literally everywhere. Since it syncs games, you are no longer forced to wait for developers to integrate cloud storage. You also no longer have to engage in the often tedious process of sending a project from your device to your cloud storage (or to yourself in the form of an email) and then downloading it on another device before you can continue your work. For many, this mbe the first time where switching from a phone to a tablet, and back again, may actually sound like an efficient and productive solution.

If you extend the realm of possibility and assume that Cyanogen will support Android TV (which would only be a guess at this point), you could easily be playing a game on your tablet or phone, get home, and continue playing on your TV. Or you could shoot your Netflix from your TV to your tablet and continue watching what you were watching in bed without having to load it manually. The sky is the limit when it comes to possibilities.

Nextbit has the potential to be a really exciting new addition to the Android experience (at least on Cyanogen). Especially for people who own two or more devices. The company has already raised $18 million and is currently hiring engineers. It’ll be very interesting to see how far they go.