Finally a tool to properly mirror the screen of your Android device
December 1, 2019•258 words
Our Android team at LOOP has envied the iOS team for a very long time now.
Not because of their toolchain or the small amount of devices they need to support, no it is a much more simple thing we were lacking that the iOS team had: a tool to properly share your mobile device's screen on a PC.
While the iOS team could simply use AirPlay to show the screen of their iPhone to the client, a native protocol which works flawlessly most of the time, we had to resort to some shady third party solutions like ApowerMirror to have a similar thing in our ecosystem.
Additionally, the tools we found are normally paid software, of which we only used the free version. Having watermarks in your shared screen is not necessarily the most professional impression you could make.
We already thought about implementing such a tool on our own, as it seems like an achievable goal, but thankfully, I've recently discovered a tool called scrcpy (better write that down, if you might want to use it in the future). An opensource solution, which does not require you to install an app on your phone, but rather uses classic adb
to connect to your phone and mirror its screen.
The videostreaming is super smooth and resizing/scaling works like a charm. Even better: as you can use adb
wirelessly, you can also use scrcpy
wirelessly!
So in principle we got a similar solution as iOS now, it just took us quite a bit longer to find it :)