Remote Control of Android Devices

Sometimes, we want to remotely control android devices which connected to another node like below:

graph LR
  B[Emulator] --> A[Node IP:<192.168.98.87>];
  C[Android Phone] --> A;
  D[Rack] --> A;
  E[...] --> A;

First of all, we need to know that each adb device has a control port.

For example, when you run an android emulator named emulator-5554, you can connect to it by running adb connect 127.0.0.1:5555.

So as long as we can access the port 192.168.98.87:5555, we can remotely control emulator-5554.

Nginx is a good choice to do this. To do this:

Install nginx on the node.

sudo apt install nginx -y

Configure port forwarding in nginx config file:

/etc/nginx/nginx.conf

stream {
    server {
        listen 9887;
        proxy_pass 127.0.0.1:5555;
    }
}

Reload nginx:

sudo nginx -s reload

After the above steps, we can connect to the emulator by running adb connect 192.168.98.87:9887. And we can use scrcpy to do a screencast of the emulator.