BrowserDroid Cast and Control

With BrowserDroid you can remotely view the screen of and type and tap on your phone or tablet over WiFi using just a modern web browser. You get a live screencast of the device right in the browser without the need of any additional software or plugins.


This application requires a rooted Android device to work!


Features:
* Easy to set up and use.
* Fully remote control phones and tablets.
* Screencast directly into the browser.
* SSL encryption and access key for securing the connection.
* Text input using key events and an optional dedicated input method for international characters.
* Mouse clicks generating touch events and scroll emulation using the wheel to swipe up/down.
* Pause and resume a session at will, remotely lock and wake the device.
* Support for automatic screen rotation.


Caveats:
* The screen refresh rate is limited.


The app was successfully tested on a Nexus 5 running Android 4.4, 5.0 and 5.0.1, a Nexus 9 running Android 5.01, a Galaxy Nexus running Android 4.2.1 and a Galaxy Tab 10.1 running CM Android 4.2.1.


Using this app you can for example remote control your phone to use messaging apps installed on the device without having to get up from your keyboard. You can also remotely wake up and lock your device and send special keys to the phone or tablet to remote control volume and media playback. As the application doesn't depend on other software you can also use it with mobile browsers and control a phone with a tablet or similar. It can also be used to share the screen for demos or presentations without any further setup.


While the usage is very similar to a setup with a VNC server on the rooted device and a VNC viewer on the receiving end, the key advantage with this app is that the receiving device does not need a dedicated viewer to be installed.


About the BrowserDroid Input Method

The app tries to emulate international characters (like umlauts and accented characters) but not all apps correctly recognize them. Please enable and switch to the BrowserDroid Input Method to get these characters working correctly (use the "Switch Input Method" button). The dedicated input method does not display a virtual keyboard on screen. It simply receives the desired characters and directly sends them to the applications. It can also be used if you don't want to have the on-screen keyboard take up space.

It also works well to simply use the app to use a physical keyboard attached to a computer for typing on the device. Just pause the screen updates to reduce power consumption, typing will continue to work.


About the Screencast Feature

The application runs a service using the native screencap utility to grab and send the screen content to the browser. A delta update protocol minimizes the amount of data that is transferred to the changed screen parts only. The output can be scaled down to further minimize data transfer and lag. It essentially works like a VNC server but without the need to install additional software.


SSL Certificates

The application uses self-signed SSL certificates. This causes warnings in browsers when visiting the advertised URL because the validity of the issuer cannot be verified. This behavior is expected for each new session you open with BrowserDroid, as a new SSL certificate is generated for each run of the service.


Support

If you are having trouble getting the application to work or found a bug, please send an email using the contact information below. To best address your issue please describe any problem as clearly as you can, possibly using screenshots or videos. Any issue will be looked at and fixed as quickly as possible. If an issue can not be worked out, the app will be refunded.