I love my phones. Despite using my Pixel 8 Pro full-time for a long time already, I’m still using the Pixel 6 before it and it was still fully functional. Even the batteries were still pretty decent even if it wasn’t in its prime. It was the perfect home phone and was mostly used while my Pixel 8 Pro was either charging or to minimize its use for only outside and at work.
This weekend, an unfortunate slip-up happened. Quite literally, actually. It slipped on top of my fridge, hit face first on and hit the hard ceramic flooring.
It looked fine at first, and then I noticed it was starting to have these faint blue hues at the top.
And then it got worse and worse. It was just subtle blue-like smear patterns at first that only occupied the statusbar, and then it spread from top to bottom towards the entire screen and worse — the spots went from light blue to deep blue to pitch black.
Uh oh! That’s a sign of a dying display.
While the issue wasn’t immediate, I noticed that the “bleed” was spreading slowly by the hour. So I had to act fast. I had a plan.
August 26, 2024 1:00 AM (GMT+8) by this time it looked really bad. I wish I took photos around August 26, 2024 10:00 AM (GMT+8) since it was still mostly okay back then.
You can barely make out the keyboard, and the status bar is completely unusable. Thankfully, the digitizer works perfectly and you can still tap through the screen.
By August 27, 2024 12:00 AM (GMT+8), the screen damage has gone progressively worse. It’s effectively blind usage at this point.
Yeah, this is FUBAR already. But thankfully, I’ve already found a way through this.
Thankfully, past me had the foresight to make it usable even if the display was broken, and to evacuate any lingering apps that should’ve been on my Pixel 8 Pro already.
I’ve decided to enable the latter two because I remembered that Android already had working display mirroring and use years before Apple even implemented iPhone mirroring on their Macs. This is done thanks to scrcpy, wonderfully developed by the Genymotion team.
GitHub - Genymobile/scrcpy: Display and control your Android device
And I say, scrcpy is wonderful. It was already technically impressive when it was first introduced because it did do full mirroring and touch input back in 2018 and nowadays it’s improved very well to be performant and feature-rich, like doing audio passthroughs so you can hear the audio through your computer and even recording. (And it was before most Android systems didn’t have screen recording enabled with a direct interface).
And also, thank god the Android team made adb totally capable to do all the lower-level stuff that makes this all work.
sequenceDiagram
actor User
participant scrcpy
participant adb
participant AndroidPhone
User->>scrcpy: Sends input (e.g., keyboard/mouse actions)
scrcpy->>adb: Sends command to adb
adb->>AndroidPhone: Forwards command to Android device
AndroidPhone-->>adb: Sends response (screen updates)
adb-->>scrcpy: Forwards response to scrcpy
scrcpy-->>User: Displays updated screen
Honestly, I am somewhat regretting I only did this recently rather than years ago because there’s a lot of things that Pixel phones do that would benefit on the large screen.
I always used the Pixel’s Live Caption and Live Translate features, but I never thought of having the transcript from a mirrored Pixel while watching the video on the Mac.
The recent update lets me expand the caption window to a bigger box like this, to even fullscreen, so I can see some potential with that too.
I can access Google Home which has additional connections that my Apple Home app cannot handle at the moment.
I can use YouTube Music directly on the phone and use it as the media player rather than dedicating a tab for it in Firefox. It’s also nicer this way since I can download songs so I’m not reliant on the network for audio streaming. This works, since the phone and the Mac are both connected via USB.
