Display your Android smartphone screen on your computer and control it with mouse and keyboard.
Controlling your smartphone from your PC is what Microsoft’s application “Your Phone” is trying to offer. Access to multimedia content, management of notifications, sending and receiving SMS, the main functions are there, but remain too limited for those who wish to be able to manage all the content of their smartphone without having to leave the keyboard and mouse of their PC.
Third-party solutions, much more complete, exist. They make it possible to go much further, in particular by doing “mirroring”, a function capable of directly displaying the smartphone screen on the computer screen.
This is exactly what the open source software scrcpy, published by the French company Genymobile, offers. Once installed and configured, the program allows you to control your smartphone from your PC, using the mouse and keyboard, without having to switch from one device to another.
1. Download scrcpy
First, download the open source scrcpy application on your computer. Offered free of charge, it allows you to “mirror” your smartphone, in other words, to display your smartphone screen in a separate window in Windows, as if it were an application.
Download scrcpy for Windows (Free)
2. Activate the options for developers
Before you can use scrcpy, you must activate the developer options on your Android smartphone. These options, disabled by default, allow you to take advantage of advanced features.
A few very simple steps are enough to activate developer mode on Android.
3. Enable USB debugging
Open the Settings of your smartphone, and go to System to deploy the Advanced options. Then go to Developer options.
In the Debugging section, enable USB Debugging. Then authorize the USB debugging by pressing OK, and validate the fingerprint of the computer’s RSA key by pressing OK again. Then close Settings.
4. Start scrcpy
Then connect your smartphone to your PC using its USB cable. Unzip the archive of scrcpy on your hard disk, and launch the application by double-clicking on the scrcpy.exe file.
5. Control your smartphone from the PC
A command prompt window should open along with a window that matches the screen format of your smartphone.
You can now use your computer’s mouse and keyboard to take control.
You will also need to learn some shortcuts to be able to use certain commands on your smartphone:
- Turn on the smartphone screen: Ctrl + P or right click on the window
- Lock screen: press Ctrl + O
- Show smartphone in full screen: Ctrl + F
- Resize the window to actual size (to the nearest pixel): Ctrl + G
- Resize the window to remove the black bands: Ctrl + X or double click on the window
- Press the Home button: Ctrl + H / click on the mouse wheel
- Go back: Ctrl + B or right double-click
- Use multitasking: Ctrl + S
- Show optional menu: Ctrl + M
- Increase / decrease volume: Ctrl +↑ / Ctrl + ↓
- Deploy / close action center: Ctrl + N / Ctrl + Shift + N
- Copy content from Android clipboard to your PC: Ctrl + C
- Paste content from Windows clipboard to Android: Ctrl + V
Scrcpy also makes it very easy to transfer files stored on your PC to your Android smartphone. A simple drag and drop of the element directly on the smartphone window is enough to import files, excluding APKs, to the root of the memory card / sdcard /.
As for the applications, you can easily install them by dragging and dropping APK files from your PC to the Scrcpy window.