Popular:
 Building Resilient Systems on AWS: Learn how to design and implement a resilient, highly available, fault-tolerant infrastructure on AWS.

Mirror Android Device to Computer

By  on  

As I continue my adventure into Android development, pair programming has been a huge help in learning this new platform. When it's time to build and run the app, relying on the emulator is a fools' game -- the emulator is slow and it's hard to reliably simulate gestures.

If you have an android device, like a phone or tablet, you can plug it into your computer and mirror the display to your computer using an awesome utility called scrcpy!

Start by installing scrcpy with Homebrew:

brew install scrcpy

You may also need to install adb:

brew cask install android-platform-tools

Once you have scrcpy installed, you can start mirroring your Android phone to your computer by executing the command:

scrcpy

The Android device, whether phone or tablet, obviously must be connected to the computer at the time. The mirroring is super responsive and much nicer than an Android emulator. I love using scrcpy to pair program or record videos of app interactions.

When I first started Android development, I was worried I'd be stuck trying to use an emulator to demo features or bugs. Big thanks to scrcopy for making Android life easier!

Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring

Recent Features

  • By
    9 Mind-Blowing Canvas Demos

    The <canvas> element has been a revelation for the visual experts among our ranks.  Canvas provides the means for incredible and efficient animations with the added bonus of no Flash; these developers can flash their awesome JavaScript skills instead.  Here are nine unbelievable canvas demos that...

  • By
    Convert XML to JSON with JavaScript

    If you follow me on Twitter, you know that I've been working on a super top secret mobile application using Appcelerator Titanium.  The experience has been great:  using JavaScript to create easy to write, easy to test, native mobile apps has been fun.  My...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Chris Coyier’s Favorite CodePen Demos IV

    Did you know you can triple-heart things on CodePen? We’ve had that little not-so-hidden feature forever. You can click that little heart button on any Pen (or Project, Collection, or Post) on CodePen to show the creator a little love, but you can click it again...

  • By
    Animated AJAX Record Deletion Using jQuery

    I'm a huge fan of WordPress' method of individual article deletion. You click the delete link, the menu item animates red, and the item disappears. Here's how to achieve that functionality with jQuery JavaScript. The PHP - Content & Header The following snippet goes at the...

Discussion

  1. Akis

    Thank you David! Nice tool but on macOS 10.13.6 with adb on PATH and after successfully wireless connected (through adb) to my Xiaomi Mi 9, running 

    scrcpy

    I took this error log:

    ERROR: Command not found: [~/Android/platform-tools/adb scrcpy], [push], [/usr/local/Cellar/scrcpy/1.11/share/scrcpy/scrcpy-server], [/data/local/tmp/scrcpy-server]
ERROR: (make 'adb' accessible from your PATH or define its fullpath in the ADB environment variable)
ERROR: Could not execute "adb push"

    Everything works but scrcpy… Any idea?

  2. Akis

    Actually, by removing 

    export ADB="$ANDROID_SDK_HOME/platform-tools/adb scrcpy"

    from my .bash_profile, the first error line reads:

    ERROR: Command not found: [adb], [push], [/usr/local/Cellar/scrcpy/1.11/share/scrcpy/scrcpy-server], [/data/local/tmp/scrcpy-server]

    I pushed (with “adb push”) the appropriate file successfully on my phone, just to test if adb push command works.

  3. JJS

    If you use the Android Emulator from Google based on x86 processor with HAXM, it’s superfast, and superfast loaded. If you use the ARM images it’s slow as hell indeed.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!