scrcpy
FreeMirror an Android phone to your desktop and drive it with mouse and keyboard
Mirrors an Android device to your desktop over USB or Wi-Fi and lets you drive it with your mouse and keyboard. Nothing is installed on the phone, no root is required and no account is involved. Latency typically sits in the tens of milliseconds, with screen recording, clipboard sync and drag-to-install.
Why we picked it
147,608 stars, Apache-2.0, from Genymobile. It solves one concrete problem: operating an Android phone from your computer — taking screenshots and recordings, replying to messages with a real keyboard, demoing an app on a big screen, or using the phone as a second panel.
The elegant part is that nothing is installed on the phone. It works through Android's own adb debugging channel: no client app, no root, no account. Plug in a cable, enable debugging, and it runs. Unplug when done and nothing is left behind — quite unlike vendor mirroring tools that want a companion app and a login.
Genuinely useful features abound: a shared clipboard in both directions (copy text on the desktop,
paste it on the phone), drag an APK onto the window to install it, --record to capture straight
to mp4, and the ability to turn the phone's own screen off while continuing to control it (saves
battery, and keeps the screen private).
Two barriers to be clear about. First, it is a command-line tool. scrcpy launches it and
flags control resolution, bitrate and recording. Community GUI front ends exist if you want one,
but the official build is CLI. Second, you must enable USB debugging on the phone the first
time (Settings → About phone → tap the build number to unlock developer options). That is
Android's security design and there is no way around it.
After one wired connection you can switch to wireless mode and keep using it on the same Wi-Fi with the cable unplugged, at the cost of slightly higher latency.