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
    LightFace: Facebook Lightbox for MooTools

    One of the web components I've always loved has been Facebook's modal dialog.  This "lightbox" isn't like others:  no dark overlay, no obnoxious animating to size, and it doesn't try to do "too much."  With Facebook's dialog in mind, I've created LightFace:  a Facebook lightbox...

  • By
    fetch API

    One of the worst kept secrets about AJAX on the web is that the underlying API for it, XMLHttpRequest, wasn't really made for what we've been using it for.  We've done well to create elegant APIs around XHR but we know we can do better.  Our effort to...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    GitHub-Style Sliding Links

    GitHub seems to change a lot but not really change at all, if that makes any sense; the updates come often but are always fairly small. I spotted one of the most recent updates on the pull request page. Links to long branch...

  • By
    Disable Autocomplete, Autocapitalize, and Autocorrect

    Mobile and desktop browser vendors do their best to help us not look like idiots by providing us autocomplete, autocorrect, and autocapitalize features.  Unfortunately these features can sometimes get in the way;  we don't always want or need the help they provide.  Luckily most browsers allow...

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!