Samsung Phones SmartView Application Bug

Fixing Problems With Samsung Phone SmartView Application

By Strictly-Software 

I have a Samsung Galaxy S8 mobile phone and recently I have had issues with the inbuilt SmartView application that allows you to mirror the screen of your phone to nearby devices such as Televisions, Rokus, Chromecasts and other Wifi enabled devices.

You access the app by using the swipe down settings panel at the top of the phone. It's on the second page accessed by swiping left and it's in the top right hand corner. See the below screenshot of my settings panel.

Whilst many applications that let you play videos have a "Play with external device" option that allows you to select the useful app AllCast before the device to then show the video on, some apps don't have a Chromecast beam square or option to play on an external device. 

This is where mirroring your screen is useful as you can just mirror yours phones screen to a TV and anything you do on the phone is then shown on the TV. The downside is that you can't use the phone or other apps whilst mirroring without your TV showing that app. However if you can use AllCast 
you can play a TV show, film or video from your phone on your TV but still use your phone to access other apps or make calls.

Up until last week everything worked fine, I could select SmartView and the apps little loading icon spins before local devices are shown to pick from. In my lounge I can pick from my Samsung 4k TV or the Chromecast device attached to it. This also allows me to beam videos from apps like YouTube that I don't want to mirror my phones screen to, or apps like sporting apps that don't have options to use AllCast to beam with.

In another room I have a Panasonic TV which also has a Roku attached and both could be used by AllCast or my phone to mirror to.The SmartView app used to be able to pick all 4 devices up and I could choose which TV or device to mirror my phone to.

However for some reason as I was watching a football game by mirroring my screen so the app could show the game on a big screen I left my pad. The connection was disconnected but when I came back I tried to use SmartView to re-connect it to my TV, but no devices were shown as available. In fact it didn't even look like it was scanning the room to find any devices to play to. Nothing was spinning in the corner and only the About Us and Contact us options were shown.

I filed numerous bug reports using Samsung's useful Members app and I had a reply that told me to go into System Settings, Applications, Select Show System Apps, choose SmartView then clear its cache. I did this but it didn't fix anything.

However tonight I came across a fix. I had to turn developer options on. You do this by going into Settings then About Phone and in there select Software Information before clicking on the Build Number about 7 times and it will give you the Developer Options.

In there you scroll down to Networking and turn on the option called "Wireless Display Certification"..

I then went into SmartView and it started spinning again, however a new panel appeared at the bottom with numerous WiFi connection options that I just ignored.

I then just scrolled to the bottom of these options and there appeared my selection of devices, in this case my TV and Chromecast.

And on choosing one, once again my phones screen was now mirrored to my TV.

I have no idea why this worked or what stopped SmartView from working in the first place but by doing my own debugging and playing around with the networking options I managed to solve what Samsung Tech Support couldn't. 

Hopefully this fix may help other Samsung phone users who have the same issue as me.

By Strictly-Software

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