Android Screenshot Server
This small application is a proof of concept for a way to retrieve screenshots from any application on an Android device.
Please note that this can be a serious security hole and should NOT be used in real conditions. To retrieve properly an Android device screen content, use the MediaProjection API.
How does it work
The Screenshot Server application work like a standard Java application instead of an Android application. Therefore, it must be launched from the command line using adb. This is a small server application which listen on the specified port on localhost (57000 by default), and make use of hidden APIs to retrieve the screen content.
To keep the server running once the adb connection is closed, the scripts directory contains some Unix shell scripts to run it in background. The server must be launched using the shell user. The killServer.sh script must be copied to the device to be launched, but not runServer.sh.
Client applications which connect to the port will just retrieve the screenshot as a PNG file, then the connexion will be closed. A small sample is provided in the screenshotClient module.
Requirements
- Android device with version 5.0 or above (API level 21). Note that since we use hidden APIs, further versions of Android could remove them and make the application unusable.
- Android SDK installed on a computer, or a single adb executable available in the path.