LinkAndroid: one desktop app for Android connect, mirror, control, record and file manage

Desktop tooling for Android devices usually splits by job: scrcpy mirrors, ADB commands control, file transfer is another app. LinkAndroid, open-sourced by modstart-lib (Apache-2.0, 2,782 stars as of November 7, 2026), puts all of it into one desktop UI — five connection modes, mirroring with reverse control, screen recording, file and app management, and multi-device grouping on a single screen.

Core features

• Five connection modes: plug-in USB autodetect, QR-code wireless pairing, 6-digit pairing codes, IP:port direct connect, and mDNS discovery of devices on the LAN.
• Mirror and reverse control: low-latency high-quality mirroring, keyboard-and-mouse control from the desktop, an OTG mode that turns the computer into a simulated input device, and camera mirroring with resolution/frame-rate options.
• Multi-device orchestration: group and filter devices, a follow mode that syncs operations across devices, and running the same task on many phones at once.
• Task automation: Cron-expression scheduling with run logs, plus an HTTP API (port 53070) for triggering tasks remotely.
• Tunable mirroring: bitrate, frame rate, always-on-top and border display options; file management covers drag-and-drop transfer and direct APK installs.

Typical use cases

• Android development and debugging: install, logs, file transfer, screenshots and recording from one window.
• Multi-device testing: run the same automation across a device farm and watch the results side by side.
• Remote assistance: wire the HTTP API into a script for remote device control — on-call no longer means carrying a test phone, and the run log keeps the receipt.

Quick start

Grab the desktop build from GitHub Releases (web-tech stack, Windows/macOS/Linux), enable USB debugging on the phone and plug in; wireless mode pairs by QR code when phone and computer share a network, and mDNS discovery skips even the QR step — same-subnet devices list themselves for one-click connect. The built-in code editor with syntax highlighting plus task templates mean “repetitive operations” are defined once — write an ADB script, attach a Cron schedule, and daily device checks stop consuming anyone’s time. The HTTP API closes the loop for CI-style triggers.

Summary

LinkAndroid fits Android developers, testers and operations teams managing device fleets; iOS is out of scope. Facts and limits: Apache-2.0, TypeScript (ADB underneath), open since September 2024; mirroring quality depends on USB bandwidth, wireless mode follows network conditions, and OTG input simulation needs extra permissions on some models. It complements rather than replaces scrcpy — scrcpy owns mirroring latency, LinkAndroid owns everything around the connection: logs, shell, Cron and device grouping, the parts scrcpy leaves out that are actually most of device management.