Want to see your Android phone on your PC?

[GreyGeek]

I was a big Airdroid user and fan years ago, but people started asking questions about privacy, and not getting answers, and the app started to make it difficult to use it without logging in, so that their servers were involved. I smelled a rat and swore off it.

Right you are, and Apple is even worse. My first Android phone was an UNLOCKED Redmi Note 7, which I got from Amazon for $185. It was an AWESOME phone. I put all of Xeomi's stuff into a folder and moved it to the back page, and never signed into or logged into their cloud or other services. I had access to every file that the Android Pie 9.0 created. It was while browsing the Map storage files that I found the text file containing line entries of GPS and a guesstimate of what I was doing. There were so many line entries that I could track my location within 10 feet and their guesses as to what I was doing was fairly accurate ... at home, grocery shopping, driving to..., in parking lot, etc...

With the unlocked phone I could change settings that my current Android, the Samsung GS10, don't even show, or won't let me touch. And my biggest peeve is that the GS10's Settings menu lacks logical organization. Intuition is not useful for navigating it.

[Don B. Cilly]

I see. So, I can have a slightly bigger screen of my phone on my monitor and control it with my bluetooth mouse.
Nice. I personally... have no use for it but some people might.
What I can use is file transfer and messaging, and KDEconnect (and webapps for Whatsapp and Telegram) does that anyway.

@jlittle, I used it with <local IP address>:8888 in Firefox, no server involved, it worked.
Still, it has ads and... stuff (meaning who knows...) but Android is like that anyway.

[jlittle]

I was a big Airdroid user and fan years ago, but people started asking questions about privacy, and not getting answers, and the app started to make it difficult to use it without logging in, so that their servers were involved. I smelled a rat and swore off it.

[hallergard]

You are right! I had a bluetooth mouse on my android tv.

[Don B. Cilly]

Cool. I can see it, but can't act (mouse does nothing), Where's the trick to that, then

[hallergard]

Don B. Cilly you have to tap the Mirroring icon (scissors) to see the phone screen with AirDroid

[GreyGeek]

On my system, with ADB activated on my Android phone, and running scrcpy, I can run the phone from my laptop and run the laptop from my phone. On KDEConnect I have all 20 or so plugins checked, and I've tested most of them. They work.
I can receive and send SMS's from my laptop through my phone. I am partially deaf and I use headphones to hear my laptop audio better, which means I can't hear my phone. When my phone rings I get a phone icon appearing over KDEConnect. I can control videos on my laptop from my phone and on my phone from my laptop. Scrcpy rotates horizontally when I am in the landscape mode on the phone. In affect, my laptop and phone are one.

[Don B. Cilly]

But I can't view it with Airdoid either.
What I see with it is this:



which is just a mock-up of a phone screen.

The Scrcpy app actually does let you see (and act on) your phone. But it need adb, debug mode, a bit dodgy.
At that level, I'd rather just connect the phone directly to the screen and use the bluetooth mouse (and keyboard) that I use for the Ubuntu Touch one.

[claydoh]

You can't view your screen on a PC monitor with KDE connect. This of course has limited use cases, say demonstration purposes in a classroom or conference, via a projector or something. The connecting to Linux part is mostly irrelevant, other than the fact that you don't have to boot to Windows to do this sort of task.

[Schwarzer Kater]

Just out of curiosity: what do the applications mentioned above do that KDE Connect doesn't (or do better)?
Wouldn't KDE Connect be the first choice "for us"?

I do not own an Android phone (iPhone user), so I have never connected a mobile phone to a Linux system.

[Don B. Cilly]

I tried Airdroid, and it's simple enough to install and use. Doesn't need adb or manipulations.
It doesn't really do much more than what KDE connect does though. It just has pretty... er, colourful icons for it. :·)

[hallergard]

Yet another way, without cables, is to use the AirDroid app on the Android device: Tap AirDroid Web and you will get a link like http://192.168.0.4:8888 and enter this link in any browser on the same local network. On the PC browser you will see the Android device, and there tap either Mirror or Screenshot (depending on version), and anything you do on the Android device will be mirrored, and yes your mouse works.

Made a short video with my Android TV mirrored to my PC browser (sorry, works just as well on Linux) https://tinyurl.com/ut3cxbp https://youtu.be/YxwEOuGUta4 (addressing the internal audio recording issue requiring cable to the PC)

[claydoh]

I have used Vysor some years ago, before it became a browser tool

https://github.com/koush/vysor.io

And with Scrcpy iirc you can configure adb over the network, ie wireless mirroring.


With my new phone, if i plug it in to a monitor or TV, I can get a rudimentary desktop-like interface, if I connect a keyboard and mouse.

[GreyGeek]

https://github.com/Genymobile/scrcpy/
sudo apt scrcpy

Pug a USB cable into your Android phone and then plug the cable into a USB port on your Kubuntu 20.04 laptop. (Don't know if it works with previous releases... probably does).

After setting ABD permission and setting permissions, immediately your Android phone display appears on your laptop display, and is about the same size. However, you can expand it. When YouTube, for example, shows better in the horizontal mode it will switch or you can rotate it to horizontal.

I found I could control my phone from my laptop using my mouse.

Neat!