- Out of the box, the Pixel 8a won’t support mirroring its display when you connect it to an external monitor.
- However, in the upcoming June update, Google will add support for display output over USB-C.
- This capability will also come to the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro soon.
Since its inception, the Pixel lineup has omitted display output as a feature for reasons on which we can only speculate. However, Google finally changed gears with its Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro phones, which have hardware support for display output via their USB-C ports. Neither phone in the Pixel 8 series launched with display output enabled out of the box, though. Instead, Google quietly enabled display output on the Pixel 8 in an Android beta update. Similarly, Google’s brand new Pixel 8a smartphone doesn’t ship with display output enabled out of the box, but this feature will likely be coming in next month’s software update.
The Google Pixel 8a, like the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro, is powered by Google’s Tensor G3 chipset. Thus, it’s no surprise that all three phones share a lot of internal components, such as their USB controller. Although Google wired up the USB-C port on all three phones at the factory to support sending a DisplayPort Alternate Mode signal over a connected USB-C cable, the company disabled this capability using a software flag. The system property persist.vendor.usb.displayport.enabled is read by the USB initialization file for all Tensor G3-series devices, and if the property is set to 0, then DisplayPort Alternate Mode is disabled.