[No root required] Control your Android phone from your computer with Scrcpy
There are many tools available online which claim to mirror your phone's screen on your computer's monitor. Some of these are online service or closed source programs, some are premium software.
Forget virtual machines, those aren't easy to set up and can get quite resource intensive.
A friend of mine tinkers with broken phones, and he told me that he uses an open source tool called Scrcpy to recover data from phones with damaged or non-functional displays. The best part? It does not require a rooted phone, the program just passes some ADB commands to the device.
Intrigued by this, I asked him more about it, and came to now that it's a pretty straightforward application.
Things you will need
- An Android phone.
- A USB Cable.
- A computer running Windows, Linux or macOS.
- USB Drivers.
Enabling USB Debugging
There are a few steps you need to do before you can start using Scrcpy. First, you will need to enable USB debugging on the phone. It's a hidden setting which you will find under the Developer Options. To unlock it, head to your phone's settings (about phone) and tap on the Android build number 7 times.
Note: Some phones may require tapping on the firmware version number instead.
You will see a message on the screen that says something like "You're 4 steps away from becoming a developer". When 7 taps are done, the message should say "Congratulations, you're now a developer." Since this is an advanced setting, you may be prompted to enter your device's PIN number to allow it.
Go back to the previous page, and you should see a new item called "Developer Options". Tap on it and scroll down till you see the option "USB Debugging", and toggle the switch next to it to enable the setting.
Connect your phone to the computer using the USB cable. Your phone should prompt you to allow USB debugging for this computer, tap on the OK button to proceed. If your phone is not detected by your computer, you may not have the USB drivers for it. Download the Android USB Drivers from Google's website, extract the archive and install the android_winusb.inf file.
How to use Scrcpy
Download and extract the Scrcpy archive to any folder. Double-click on the scrcpy.exe. Two windows should open, one of which is a command prompt which displays the status of the connection, i.e. it shows whether your Android phone is connected or not. You can ignore this screen, but DON'T close it.
The other screen represents your phone's display. Try using it, you can use the mouse to click on the buttons, and use the phone. What can you do with it? You may use it for anything you can do on your phone, use your keyboard to type and send messages, emails, listen to music, watch videos, etc.
Close one of the 2 Scrcpy windows to exit the program. That's it, no complex interfaces to mess around with.
Warning: The 32-bit version of Scrcpy has quite a few detections on Virus Total: 6 to be precise. According to the developer's comment on GitHub from earlier this year, it appears that it is caused by MinGW and are hence false positives. You can read more about it here. The 64-bit version of the program is squeaky clean.
If you want to use Scrcpy wirelessly, refer to this guide by the developer.
The full quote is:
“The content is not stored or seen by any human unless donated as part of the feedback mechanism.”
How much time before that data collection and processing become consentless, like Microsoft likes to do ?
“Another way you can help refine this feature is to donate your actual emails so we can analyze their contents and improve the quality of suggestions in the future.”
*Pukes*
Am I the only one that wishes that MS would instead focus on fixing some of the more glaring issues with their software before implementing silly new gimmicks like this?
Outlook still loves to hang for several seconds at a time if there’s any issue accessing a mailbox (particularly a problem if you have several mailboxes open, or if your VPN connection temporarily drops). Quite why the server processing seems to share the same thread as the UI is beyond me.
I’m also sick of the recent bug in Outlook that won’t let you attach a document to an e-mail if it is open in another window. Thus forcing me to close the spreadsheet, attach it, then re-open it again. Weirdly, if it is in the “recent” list, it will attach without complaint.
Add onto this the horrible, cluttered interface in Outlook these days (so much white space and other huge elements) that make e-mail navigation a pain on a small screen and I can’t help think that fixing basic issues like these and improving the accessibility of the programs should be a far higher priority than a feature which 99% of people will probably just disable.
I want them to fix Windows 95. Instead, they flounder along with “upgrades” until they realize … oh, look: that “evolved” into an unfixable mess … lets “move on” to make a new shiny OS, and leave another bit of debris and more abandoned users in our wake.
This article is about Open Office, which is not connected to Microsoft.
Open Office is connected to this article about LibreOffice .. unless its about how you shouldn’t use OO..
Good for people who can’t spell This feature could be very annoying.
I will be turning this feature off, when it comes out for Word. I have been typing for decades, and know what I want. Having predictions come up regularly is a real pain and distraction. So I turn them off in email and on my iPhone and iPad.
I agree with Matthew B – after the latest Windows update, Word started doing this and it’s incredibly annoying. I can touch-type so I don’t need the predictions – it creates errors and slows me down.
Thanks Martin. The suggestions were annoying and sometimes inappropriate. I told Microsoft about it. I wanted to disable the suggestions and now I have. Good information.
I see the option in Outlook web and it is turned on, but I see no evidence of it actually working as I type a new email.
and fix the issue of search. search has been about the worst thing MS ever did in Outlook & since moving to the title bar has not improved and the fact default searches now are FROM: is bonkers /rant
this new feature is sh*t; it’s like a rearview camera (actually, its way worse, but the analogy is coming): the machines are taking over our need for intelligent thought.
But honestly, MSFT really ought to run focus groups that include people who have ADHD or photosensitive epilepsy. For us, this attempt to help productivity only significantly decreases it.
(It feels like we are all being treated to a dose of that brainwashing technique you see on the SyFi channel that involves a lot of flashing lights and images)
the worst part about any of this: that our comments, reactions, suggestions, thoughts… are never actually heard or acknowledged by any of these tech companies who just shove new crap onto our corporate PCs and don’t think twice about end user experience.
sorry y’all, rant over. for now.
I absolutely hate this feature. Thank you so much for the how-to to turn it off. Now that you pointed it out, I will know to check the tiny bar in the left corner, but I spent time I shouldn’t have had to trying to turn this feature off before finding your post.
I think “features” like this should be opt-in, not opt out, or should be much easier to find to turn off. And I agree with the suggestions above – there are plenty of other issues Microsoft needs to fix before adding “helpers” like this. One that wasn’t mentioned above – terrible grammar in the suggested grammar fixes. As often as they’re right, they’re wrong. And the database programmers need to learn the use of apostrophes…. Thanks for the rant space. :)
Thank you for posting this where I could find it and use it after an MS Office update today.
Sadly, this nonsense is the same thing I see my company implementing and me coding for them: window-dressing trinkets that are this year’s Christmas toys that everyone needs to be told that they want, while data-integrity code defects go un-addressed because no salesperson can make a commission off of us publishing their correction.
Our society is evolving, and being run by a generation that learned to communicate in broken grammar on their smartphone while nursing a five-second attention span.
They _want_ the machine to think for them. It is so much easier than thinking for one’s self.
Abdication of personal responsibility.
Corporate America is only too willing to step in, for a modest fee and your privacy.
We aren’t going to get Microsoft or anybody else to stop. There’s far too much money to be made at it.
As above, thanks for the rant space.
We will survive this, somehow.
So, Microsoft wants to use what we type to improve AI while charging me a hefty annual price for Office 365 subscriptions. Then someday AI will tell me what to see, think and do and its happening already. Someone needs to get a hold of the monster and put it back in the pit.
How will they profit from improving AI?
Thanks for this article, this behavior started on my machine yesterday no doubt a sneaky effect of an update. It was easy to fix using your instructions, but I suspect Word and Outlook are still “phoning home” everything I type even though the predictive text is shut off.
They think we’re all stupid. They should be paying us.
Thank you for the resourceful article! I looked for the status bar entry, but I couldn’t find it in the web version of Microsoft Word. What I did find, however, was Editor (between Dictate and Designer) above the opened document, and the option to disable suggested text was in there. Scroll down to Text Predictions and click the item’s “button” to turn this annoying feature off. I think Off should be default. I hate when developers set defaults for items they think I need. Adobe is another company that does that when people want or need to download the free or pro version of its Acrobat PDF Reader. I often tell my students to uncheck the boxes next to the McAfee antivirus and Chrome extension options before downloading the reader because they likely do not need them. I think these options should be unchecked by default. Let the consumers make up their own minds.
Thanks so much for telling us how to disable this intrusive feature – predictive text! It’s like having a know-it-all teacher always looking over your shoulder. Very irritating!
I can appreciate why some people would love this feature, and in some cases it makes sense where time is more critical. But it should not be the default.
Unfortunately, it seems to me that the programmers job is made simpler when the human conversation is simpler. Predictive text, if used, limits the conversation to a box only as big as a programmers imagination and literary ambition. I know a lot of programmers. Imagination is not their strong suit – no offense to creative programmers intended. Broadly speaking, to predict the manner in which I prefer to speak would require far more resources than they would ever allocate.
If it were up to me they would go the opposite direction as a software company. I want a far simpler interface with basic editing function and attachments. Anything more than that is a distraction and I can honestly say, totally ignored and certainly a distraction making me wish I wasn’t on outlook.
In the end, I disable nearly every “improvement” Microsoft offers, and check “metered connection” to prevent it’s downloads from happening in the middle of mastering a single for a customer. Of course that is not supposed to happen but we all know how real life works.
Ill pay 5x what they are charging if they strip it down to an OS that works as a background product and doesn’t need the internet and isn’t of bloatware. That OS would be pure gold, worth every penny.
Grateful to have found out how to turn it off. If this is how good AI is supposed to be then we’re in worse trouble than I thought.
Microsoft, and they’re not the only ones guilty of this, need to stop “giving us nice things” without asking us *FIRST* whether we want it or not.
I am sick to death of finding some new app running on my machine that I didn’t see before, didn’t ask for, and didn’t authorize. Then I look up on the web and it’s 15 steps to get rid of it. Christ, it wasn’t hardly ANY steps to get it!!
A true annoyance. I couldn’t believe this feature when it appeared and after tolerating it for a few days I did a ‘net search for disabling it. I’m a writer by trade and living, and this is antithetical to creation, whether fiction or non. In my mind, it reflects the whole dumbing down of this generation – it can give someone the appearance of being articulate, only to discover that they are anything but upon first meeting (or interview). Beware.
Thanks for the tip on how to turn it off, was the first hit when I looked it up. I’m not really willing to slow down and check what suggestions they offer me as someone who can type 115 wpm ?
Predictive text has sprung up on the desktop version and this article does not address that version. There is no “Text Predictions” on the desktop version to turn on or off.
I finally figured out how to turn it back off!! when it starts to add the prediction hover the mouse over the prediction and it will take you to ‘text prediction’ and you can deselect it.
Why ANYONE would want this is a question that boggles the mind.
It is VERY clear to me that every time the programmers have some lovely little hack they like, they are convinced ALL of us would like them. Not. I’m with what Bill said last July – I would pay a HUGE amount for a version of Word that would just stay the same and do what I want and that doesn’t have a bunch of bells and whistles that aren’t necessary. Please!!!!
Thank you!! I looked in vain in the too-full and too-many “Options” screens for a way to turn off this annoyance.
I wish there was a Notepad-on-caffine mode — not the wannabe one-size-fits-all unstable multimedia-editor-on-crack mode that might change erratically from day to day.
There are too many bells and whistles in Word. Remember WordPerfect? It behaved like traditional software: Do this until I tell you to do otherwise — and the current settings were visible in an optional “codes” pane. Instead, Word buries formatting, styles and who knows what else in the paragraph marker. If I want to change the format of something, it may presume to change all similar items in both directions in the document. Feh!!!
Back to your excellent post: thank you for letting know how turn off this unwanted “help” from the presumptuous twenty-somethings at M$.
The status bar toggle removes the annoyance in the current document, but it may be baaaack in a new document.
There is perhaps a more permanent way to dispose of this annoyance:
In the “File” menu, choose “Options”
Then in “Advanced” pane (listed at the left of the options), navigate to the “Editing options” section.
In that long list of micro-text, uncheck the box “Show text predications while typing.”
My hope is that this will get rid of “just one of the intrusive PITAs.”
The navigation above is for Word in Microsoft 365 Apps running on a desktop machine.
YMMV in other versions, and these instructions may be broken when M$ spews another “upgrade” of the version I am using on this machine.
Just noticed this was turned on, presumably by business IT admin. It’s atrocious, not at all usable, like Google’s is. Instead of accepting my typed words, it refused to allow me to add a space between words as I typed, instead waiting for me to accept or reject the suggested words. So unintuitive it’s not funny. Turned it off immediately.
You need to *right* click on the thingy in the status bar; left click brings up the Options dialog, and if this predictive typing thing is on the options dlg, I sure can’t find it. Right click brings up a long, unorganized (afaict) list of options that you can check or un-check, and somewhere in that long list is predictive typing.
I’m not sure how you’d turn predictive completion back on if you decided you want it, but that’s someone else’s problem.
Now if they’d only fix automatic number, which has been broken in every version of Word I’ve ever used.
The abruptness of it popping up and diverting my attention from my flow of thoughts is very distracting. I tried it for a short while and quickly decided it was slowing me down, making me stutter in my thoughts, and just generally getting in my way. I type plenty fast on a PC. Now on current phones with screen typing that is slow and prone to typos, yeah, you might want some predictive stuff to survive there. But I still do not want anybody snooping my info, so there is that.
How are you suppose to read this article when the adds are constantly popping up where I am reading and no matter how many times I knock them down, they return with the same message. Most times with a video that is over what i was reading. I am certain this article was helpful but I will never know because I got fed up with the ads that were trying to pull me away. One just popped up here because I am telling you about it.
What’s up with this place? All I can see in the comment sections of new articles are VERY OLD (as in several years) comments.
And my comment, posted in one article, is posted in a completly different one…
Very strange. This is the second time this week where there is a disconnect between the article and its comments!
I have had LibreOffice 7.6 for over a week. The only fault that I can find is that the help function still does not work in Ubuntu. It tries to find a web page that does not exist. This occurs in both the menu function of help and pressing F1.
I found this in earlier versions of 7.x, and reported it, but was brushed off.
I think it works in Windows, but I am not sure.
Did you download and install the separate optional help package, that does not come with the base package ? If not, I wouldn’t wonder.
Interesting. Article about Libre Office, but comments on MS and Word, dating back to sometime in 2021. Who’s in charge here?
LibreOffice is great. Some of our customers are still using outdated MS Office versions. With there okay, we install it and set the saved file formats to MS, Writer font as Calibri. About 90% still use it years later. The ones that don’t typically require Microsoft 365 for work.
Notepad2 is all I find myself using these days.
Notepad ? Why don’t you use Vi ? (well or Vim if necessary)
Notepad as nearly as terrible and unnecessarily feature-bloated as Emacs.
But if you are truly hardcore, you’d use ed or edlin and nothing else.
No, not Notepad, Notepad2, which is a completely different application. On top of that Notepad2 is a Windows only application, so mentioning Linux text editors like Vi(m), Emacs, ed and edlin does not really make sense.
In the past I didn’t like LibreIffice but after they improved a few things in 7.4 and 7.5 I actually like it and use it. Mostly Writer. In terms of features it is much better than any other software of this kind except MS Office. In terms of customization it seems the best. Guys who prefer minimalism may use OnlyOffice, but work is way more comfortable and productive in LibreOffice. As for questionable improvements, Libre gets them but as long as I can turn new features off I don’t really mind.
Comments are broken or something. Oldest is from February 22, 2021. :S