Microsoft's Windows 10 Insider Builds have been advancing in leaps and bounds as far as mobile integration goes. The Your Phone app is becoming ever more feature-rich, now supporting notification syncing over both Wi-Fi and mobile data. Your Phone also supports screen mirroring, albeit only with select devices. Your Phone is more of an all-encompassing solution to connecting your phone to your PC, and is Microsoft's official solution for connectivity. But other solutions have existed for quite a while. One such solution for screen sharing is scrcpy.

scrcpy

First appearing on GitHub in December of 2017, scrcpy allows users to control and view Android devices from Windows. It's a fantastic app which works seamlessly via a USB connection. The draw is you can control your entire device with a mouse and keyboard, and you get your phone's display on a bigger screen. Control is real time with little to no input lag. It works by executing a server on the Android device, which then communicates with the PC via a socket over an ADB tunnel. The program doesn't require your device to be rooted, just to have developer options enabled, allowing for USB Debugging to be turned on.

Now, developer rom1v has released scrcpy version 1.9. The biggest new feature in this update is that scrcpy can now mirror your device's screen while the display is turned off. It's worth noting that the screen isn't actually turned off as such, i.e. if your phone has an Always-On display feature it won't show that, so the phone isn't locked, simply the screen just doesn't display anything. The update also includes several quality-of-life improvements, like device-to-computer clipboard copy, and vice versa. On top of that, mouse-focus clickthrough has been added, meaning that if the window is out of focus, you no longer have to click to bring it back into focus, then click again to control your device. A single click will now suffice.

Scrcpy v1.9 is available now over on GitHub, though there isn't an official prebuilt archive yet for 1.9. There are, however, instructions for building the app manually, which aren't too complex, should you want to go down that route.

Changelog:

  • Add feature to turn screen off while mirroring
  • Add device-to-computer clipboard copy
  • Add computer-to-device clipboard copy
  • Find scrcpy-server.jar in the correct directory on Windows
  • Fix mouse focus clickthrough
  • Do not minimize the window on focus loss
  • Disable X11 compositor bypass
  • Continue text injection on failed character
  • Bind Home key to MOVE_HOME instead of HOME screen
  • Do not crash if expanding/collapsing panels is not supported
  • Do not power on the device if --no-control is set
  • Improve framerate counting
  • Add runtime option to render expired frames (i.e. not skip frames)
  • Downgrade SDL to 2.0.8 in Windows releases
  • Upgrade FFmpeg to 4.1.3 in Windows releases
  • Upgrade platform-tools to 29.0.1 (adb) in Windows releases