Sharing apps on android devices

Top 10 Best Screen Sharing Apps for Android in 2020

Last Updated on September 15, 2021 by Ashvin 2 Comments

Screen sharing basically means sharing your android smartphone’s screen with someone else’s device (be that a mobile or a pc). So, that they can remotely see what you’re doing on your phone (or vice versa). And in some cases, even control the device remotely.

Needs of screen sharing.

Screen sharing or screen mirroring can be a life saver sometimes. Suppose, a friend of yours doesn’t know how to use Instagram. And he or she lives in another city. You can use screen mirroring to easily teach him/her how to do that. And, say, you’re working on your PC and your phone’s not around, screen sharing can come in extremely handy.

How to share your android screen?

Sharing your android screen is quite easy. All you have to do is install a couple of apps in both of your devices and connect them together. However, there are lots of apps that demand to do that. But some are full of bugs and some don’t work smoothly.In this article, I’ve sorted out the best of those. So here are the top 10 screen sharing apps for android in 2017.

Best Screen Sharing Apps in 2020

Android to android:

These are the apps that allow you to mirror screens between your android devices (phone or tablet). The syncing is done using Bluetooth or WiFi technology. All of these apps can be installed freely from Play store.

1. Inkwire Screen Share + Assist

First in this list isan amazing app from a brilliant developer Koushik Dutta (the guy behind ClockworkMod).Inkwire lets you share your screen or see a shared screen. The best thing about this app is its Minimalist UI design. After opening the app, you can simply choose whether you want to share the screen or access someone else’s. And then match the access code between the two devices. That’s it.

Besides this, the remote user will be able to draw on the screen. This is really useful when someone is helping you out with some issues. You can also have a voice chat with that user.

2. ScreenMeet. Easy Phone Meeting

Just like Inkwire, this app helps you to mirror screen between two android devices. It also allows you to share your screen to your Personal Computer. Besides sharing screen, you can share Presentation slides, Walkthrough websites, demo mobile applications and a lot more. The app is quite convenient for business meetings and project presentations. One negative point, however, is that it lags a bit even in high-speed internet connection. Slow speed during presentations can be a pretty horrible experience. This app is free of cost and available in Play store.

3. Screen Stream Mirroring Free:

As claimed by its creators, this app is one of the most powerful screen sharing apps for android smartphones and tabs. The app doesn’t require your device to be rooted, which is a big plus for this app. The app is available freely in the Play store. But the free version limits your usage time and you have to watch ads to extend it. However, you can remove this barrier by buying the full version.

4. join.me – Simple Meetings

Just another screen sharing meeting app like ScreenMeet. It lets you connect other people in video conferencing and share your screen with them using VoIP.But your device must be running on Android Lollipop or higher in account to use this screen sharing feature. Besides these, you can zoom into the screen shared with you, which is a big thumbs-up. To talk about the cons,the UI is pretty complex for a light android user.

The next app is from the smartphone giant Samsung itself. As you may expect, this app lets you share your smartphone’s screen to another android device. Besides, it also helps you to share your android’s display with your PC or Mac.However, the biggest con of this application is that only Samsung devices are compatible with this version.

Sometimes our phone’s 5.5-inch screen isn’t big enough. Sometimes we feel really lazy to actually get up and pick the phone from the drawer. One solution to all those irritating problems is sharing your android screen to your PC. Listed below are the top apps to mirror your android screen to PC.

You can easily share your screen and control it from the PC using Google Chrome and Vysor. Vysor is basically a Google Chrome extension. This was created by the same person who developed Inkwire – Koushik Dutta.

To use this, first install Google Chrome and from the Chrome Web Store add the Vysor Plugin. Now switch on debugging mode on your phone. For that go to Settings > Developer Options > USB debugging (if you don’t see developer options, unlock it by going to About and tapping on Build number 7 times continuously). After that launch the Vysor plugin from Chrome (new tab > chrome://apps). Connect your phone to PC via USB. A prompt will appear on your phone saying – Allow USB debugging? Click on Ok. That’s it. You can now view and control your smartphone from your computer.

7. TeamViewer QS

TeamViewer is popular remote support software for PC. The Quick Support app of this software gives you the freedom to share the android screen with a computer. This is truly a gem for remote support on android devices.

To do that, first, install the TeamViewer QS app on your phone. After that, install TeamViewer software on the remote PC. From the QS app grab the ID and use it on the other end to connect both devices. Now go to the Remote Control tab. Now you have access to your phone from the computer.

Mobizen is another splendid app to mirror your android screen to PC. Besides mirroring you can remotely control your cell phone as well. To start sharing screen you have to download the Mobizen Mirroring app into your phone. And install the Mobizen PC software on your computer. Then simply connect those two and voila!

9. Airdroid (AirMirror)

Airmirror is a feature (read best feature)of the popular remote access application Airdroid. As its name suggests, this allows you to share screen between your phone and computer. This feature requires root access if you’re using a Windows PC (works fine without root on mac). So before installing it make sure your device is rooted.

First, install the Airdroidon your phone. Now install the client on your Mac or PC. Sign in to your account (or create one). Click on the telescope symbol and connect both the devices. You’re done.

This is the only paid app on this list. BBQScreen does the same task that the other 9 apps do. But, according to Team BBQ, this has higher frame rate than many of its competitor. The app works best on rooted devices. For non-rooted phones, it uses USB instead of Wi-Fi network. The full guide is available at this link.

So, these are the top 10 android apps to share your phone’s screen with another android or PC. Which one do you use? Let us know in the comments. Also, if you think the list is missing any crucial app, be sure to comment that down too.

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Sharing Content between Android apps

Sharing is caring, as they say, but sharing on Android means something perhaps slightly different. ‘Sharing’ is really shorthand for sending content such as text, formatted text, files, or images between apps.

So if ‘sharing’ == sending content, it makes slightly more sense that it is implemented using ACTION_SEND (or ACTION_SEND_MULTIPLE) Intents and its dozen extras.

While that approach is perfectly valid, I prefer to use ShareCompat, a set of classes in the v4 Support Library designed to make it easy to build intents for sharing content.

Sharing text

Sharing plain text is, as you might imagine, a good place to start. In fact, there’s not a whole lot to it:

ShareCompat.IntentBuilder uses a fluent API where you can chain together multiple method calls, using only the ones you need. For sharing, one of the most important parts is picking the right mime type — this is how apps filter what type of content they can receive. By using text/plain, we signify that our Intent will only contain plain text. Then, of course, setText() is how we actually add the CharSequence to the Intent to send. And while you can certainly send styled text using setText(), there’s no guarantee that the receiving app will honor that styling, so you should ensure that the text is legible with or without styling.

You’ll note we then use resolveActivity() before calling startActivity(). As mentioned in Protecting Implicit Intents with Runtime Checks, this is critical to prevent an ActivityNotFoundException when there is no Activity available to handle the mime type you have selected. While probably not as much of a concern with text/plain, it may be much more common with other types.

Note: when you use startActivity(shareIntent), that respects any default apps the user has set (i.e., if they’ve previously selected sharing all “text/plain” items to a certain app). If you’d like to instead always show a disambiguation chooser, use the intent generated from IntentBuilder.createChooserIntent() as explained in the ACTION_CHOOSER documentation.

Sharing HTML text

Some apps, most notably email clients, also support formatting with HTML. The changes, compared to plain text, are fairly minor:

The differences here are that we use of setHtmlText() in place of setText() and a mime type of text/html replacing text/plain. Here ShareCompat actually does a little bit extra: setHtmlText() also uses Html.fromHtml() to create a fallback formatted text to pass along to the receiving app if you haven’t previously called setText() yourself.

Given that many of the apps that can receive HTML text are email clients, there’s a number of helper methods to set the subject, to:, cc:, and bcc: email addresses as well — consider adding at least a subject to any share intent for best compatibility with email apps.

Of course, you’ll still want to call resolveActivity() just as before — nothing changes there.

Receiving text

While the focus so far has been on the sending side, it is helpful to know exactly what is happening on the other side (if not just to build a simple receiving app to install on your emulator for testing purposes). Receiving Activities add an intent filter to the Activity:

The action is obviously the more critical part — without that there’s nothing that would denote this as an ACTION_SEND (the action behind sharing). The mime type, same as with our sending code, is also present here. What isn’t as obvious are the two categories. From the element documentation:

Note: In order to receive implicit intents, you must include the CATEGORY_DEFAULT category in the intent filter. The methods startActivity() and startActivityForResult() treat all intents as if they declared the CATEGORY_DEFAULT category. If you do not declare it in your intent filter, no implicit intents will resolve to your activity.

So CATEGORY_DEFAULT is required for our use case. Then, CATEGORY_BROWSABLE allows web pages to natively share into apps without any extra effort required on the receiving side.

And to actually extract the information from the Intent, the useful ShareCompat.IntentReader can be used:

Similar to IntentBuilder, IntentReader is just a simple wrapper that make it easy to extract information.

Sharing files and images

While sending and receiving text is straightforward enough (create text, include it in Intent), sending files (and particularly images — the most common type by far) has an additional wrinkle: file permissions.

The simplest code you might try might look like

And that almost works — the tricky part is in getting a Uri to the File that other apps can actually read, particularly when it comes to Android 6.0 Marshmallow devices and runtime permissions (which include the now dangerous READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE and WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permissions).

My plea: don’t use Uri.fromFile(). It forces receiving apps to have the READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission, won’t work at all if you are trying to share across users, and prior to KitKat, would require your app to have WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE. And really important share targets, like Gmail, won’t have the READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission — so it’ll just fail.

Instead, you can use URI permissions to grant other apps access to specific Uris. While URI permissions don’t work on file:// URIs as is generated by Uri.fromFile(), they do work on Uris associated with Content Providers. Rather than implement your own just for this, you can and should use FileProvider as explained in the File Sharing Training.

Once you have it set up, our code becomes:

Using FileProvider.getUriForFile(), you’ll get a Uri actually suitable for sending to another app — they’ll be able to read it without any storage permissions — instead, you are specifically granting them read permission with FLAG_GRANT_READ_URI_PERMISSION.

Note: we don’t call setType() anywhere when building our ShareCompat (even though in the video I did set it). As explained in the setDataAndType() Javadoc, the type is automatically inferred from the data URI using getContentResolver().getType(uriToImage). Since FileProvider returns the correct mime type automatically, we don’t need to manually specify a mime type at all.

If you’re interested in learning more about avoiding the storage permission, consider watching my Forget the Storage Permission talk or at least go through the slides, which covers this topic in depth at 14:55 (slide 11).

Receiving files

Receiving files isn’t too different from text because you’re still going to use ShareCompat.IntentReader. For example, to make a Bitmap out of an incoming file, it would look like:

Of course, you’re free to do whatever you want with the InputStream — watch out for images that are so large you hit an OutOfMemoryException. All of the things you know about loading Bitmaps still apply.

The Support Library is your friend

With both ShareCompat (and its IntentBuilder and IntentReader) and FileProvider in the v4 Support Library, you’ll be able to include sharing text, HTML text, and files in your app with the best practices by default.

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Running Apps on Your Device

When building an Android app, it’s important that you always test your application on a real device in addition to emulators. This page describes how to set up your development environment and Android-powered device for testing and debugging on the device.

If you want an ideal SIM-unlocked phone to test on, then you might consider a Pixel phone.

Plug in your device to your computer with a USB cable. If you’re developing on Windows, you might need to install this universal ADB USB driver or find your specific USB driver for your device.

The next step is to enable USB debugging so your phone can interact with your computer in a developer mode.

The following steps are needed:

1. (Windows Only) Install this ADB Driver
2. Plug-in your Android Device to Computer via USB
3. Open the «Settings» App on the Device
4. Scroll down to bottom to find «About phone» item
5. Scroll down to bottom to find «Build number» section
6. Tap on «Build Number» 7 times in quick succession
7. You should see the message «You are now a developer!»
8. Go back to main «Settings» page
9. Scroll down bottom to find «Developer options» item
10. Turn on «USB Debugging» switch and hit «OK»
11. Unplug and re-plug the device
12. Dialog appears «Allow USB Debugging?»
13. Check «Always allow from this computer» and then hit «OK»

Watch this video tutorial for a visual guide to getting USB debugging enabled.

Now, we can launch apps from Android Studio onto our device:

1. Select one of your projects and click «Run» from the toolbar.
2. In the «Choose Device» window that appears, select the «Choose a running device» radio button, select the device, and click OK.

Once Gradle finishes building, Android Studio should install the app on your connected device and start it.

Not seeing your device in the «Choose Device» window? Try the following:

• Unplug your device from the USB port on the computer
• Restart the device by powering off and back on
• Verify that Settings => Developer options => USB Debugging is enabled
• Quit and re-launch Android Studio
• Force restart ADB from the «Android Device Monitor»
• Plug your device back into the USB port on the computer
• Unlock the device and press «OK» on any dialog displayed

Now the phone should work as a debugging device as expected!

Still Not Working?

If after plugging the device into the computer and you don’t see any message about authorizing the device, then you may need to purchase another USB cable. Not all USB cables are enabled for data transfer. If there’s a chance that your cable may be a charging only cable, you can purchase a USB-C cable for Pixel or the micro-USB cable for Nexus 6 and prior.

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