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This software just saved my bacon!

I dropped my phone and the screen broke. The touchscreen worked, but no backlight.

Luckily I had enabled Android debugging. It took a bit of trial and error but I managed to unlock the phone and then accept the adb key from my laptop.

After that, scrcpy let me grab all my files and transfer everything to my new phone.

If you have an android device take a few minutes to get scrcpy set up. It just might let you recover from a dead screen some day.



Yes, it is quite good for rescuing data etc. because in a lot of cases it is the screen that fails.

In your case where the backlight dies it often helps to shine a flashlight on the screen and it will usually become more intelligible.

One thing to keep in mind is that android will revoke saved debug-computers after 7 days or something meaning you have to press a popup to accept the connection. You can turn that off in the developer options and then you won't need any interactions on the device to start scrcpy (as longs as it is a computer you've used before with adb).


I know my device can do HDMI out and USB at the same time over the type-c port, so that's my main plan if I end up with a destroyed screen.

I also have kdeconnect installed on everything, but android will remove its permissions if I don't use it often enough.


> I also have kdeconnect installed on everything, but android will remove its permissions if I don't use it often enough.

Kde connect is also great! You can prevent Android from revoking permissions under the app info menu. It's labeled as "pause app activity if unused."




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