Remote Android Control App ‘Scrcpy’ 1.20 Add HID keyboard / High-resolution Icon

Scrcpy, free and open-source app to display and control your Android phone on PC / Laptop, released v1.20 with new features.

For those never heard of Scrcpy, it’s an app runs on Linux, Windows and MacOS PC to display & control Android devices either connected via USB, or wirelessly over local network.

With the app, you may do many useful things including:

  • record the Android screen on PC
  • mirror an Android device while screen off
  • copy & paste in both directions
  • you may use Android as a webcam for your PC.

In the new v1.20 released one day ago, Scrcpy introduced new official icon designed by @varlesh, author of the papirus icon theme. It’s a high-resolution icon in SVG file format.

New Scrcpy icon

It also adds ability to simulate a physical keyboard on Android to make input easy. However, it so far only supports Linux with USB Human Interface Devices (HID) keyboard. And, Android has to be connected via USB.

To enable this function, start the app either via scrcpy --hid-keyboard or scrcpy -K command.

Other changes include:

  • Adapt --help output to terminal size
  • Rework server initialization to avoid unresponsive Ctrl+c sometimes
  • Remove deprecated short options -T and -c
  • Fix “Could not find v4l2 muxer”
  • Fix workarounds for Meizu devices
  • Fix support for expand notification feature on some devices
  • Various technical refactors and fixes

How to Get Scrcpy:

For Windows EXE and source tarball, you may get them from the github releases page:

For Linux, the app is available in most Linux repositories including Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, Arch Linux, and openSUSE. However, they are mostly old! For the latest release, Ubuntu user may install the package directly from Ubuntu Software via SNAP package. And, Arch Linux may use the AUR repository.

Hi, I'm Merilyn Ne, a computer geek working on Ubuntu Linux for many years and would like to write useful tips for beginners. Forgive me for language mistakes. I'm not a native speaker of English.