Like many of you, I work every day with a computer with a keyboard, screen and mouse, but my Android phone is always with me.

I don’t use it much, and the web interfaces of WhatsApp or Telegram allow me to look at these messages better than on my mobile – both in terms of reading and, above all, writing – but at certain times It would be nice for me to be able to control my smartphone from the computer.

On Windows we have a native Microsoft solution called ‘Mobile Link’ (previously called ‘Your Phone’) which behaves sensibly and turns the traditional interface of our Android phones (and last year iPhones) into a window that provides access to notifications, messages or photos.

It’s even possible enable mirror mode (projection) seeing the phone screen as a window that mimics our mobile phone within Windows but the options of this application are not always available and its features are limited.

Of course, there are other alternatives, and AirDroid (which is increasingly focused on professional but has end-user versions such as Personal and Cast) is one of the best known.

However, in my research to find other options, I found a great option; it too is Open Source (code available on GitHub) and takes mobile control to another level from PC. Name: scrcpy.

Created in 2018 by French developer Romain Vimont, this little app is a marvel that tries to focus on a few key parts of the user experience, as its creator noted at the time. For example, it is lightweight, has smooth performance, has good image quality and low latency, and is non-intrusive.

He undoubtedly succeeded. Scrcpy is a tool You don’t even install it on your Android terminal. What you install is a downloadable app that runs a server on your Windows, macOS, or Linux PC to which your Android phone connects without needing to be rooted. The client (our mobile phone) and the server communicate through a socket using adb tunnel (a variant of secure SSH tunnels) and the workings and features of this architecture are amazing.

Photo management is one of the examples

In my case, I used this tool to connect my Android mobile phone (Huawei P40 Pro+) to Mac mini. After installing scrcpy on macOS following the instructions in the official repository, I simply enabled USB Debugging mode on my phone to launch the tool, which caused the connection to be active and I started using the phone from the PC.

First of all scrcpy recommends projection Gorgeous mobile display on our PC. A window where we can interact with our mouse and keyboard as if we were looking at another application window.

If we rotate the phone to put it in landscape mode, or if our phone automatically rotates the screen (for games, for example), the window on our computer also changes to this format. And in this case the keyboard and mouse can be used without any problems.

We can type whenever we need, it is also possible to click on icons and interface elements, as well as perform “touch gestures” by holding down the left mouse button and making the same movement on that virtual screen that we made. Make screen physics of mobile phone with your finger.

I insist the result was amazing and it was exactly what I was looking for; for example, managing my photo library, allowing me to see these photos directly on my monitor in excellent quality and at a logically larger size, so that I know whether these photos exist or not. I wanted to delete any by comparing it to something else that was similar.

But this tool allows you to enjoy interesting options. For example, transmit audio (native on Android 12), screen recordingcopy and paste items in both directions, as well as having a list of various keyboard shortcuts.

The tool can also be used by connecting the mobile phone to the computer with a USB cable – I used it this way to guarantee data transfer speed – and it can also be used wirelessly. A real discovery that has become a useful complement to my daily routine in recent weeks.

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