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How do I display my phone on my laptop?

RhinoCan

RhinoCan

Well-Known Member
I'm trying to figure out how to display the contents of my Android phone screen "live" on my laptop. The phone is a Samsung Galaxy A5 running Oreo 8.0 and the laptop is running Windows 10.

An app I am developing will be used to do a 50/50 draw for a club to which I belong. The app will generate virtual tickets and keep track of how much money I need to collect from each participant; then, once I've sold all the tickets that people want, the app will choose one at random and I will award the prize to the winner. We'll be in a meeting room at the local library and I will have a projector connected to the laptop so that the whole room can see what's on it. All I need to do now is get the contents of the phone screen on to the laptop!

Can anyone enlighten me on the best way to do this? I'd strongly prefer a method that doesn't require me to buy additional apps or hardware beyond the charging cable I already have but if there is no other way, I will keep my mind open to spending some money ;-)
 
Thank you very much! Sidesync seems to do what I want - and more that I'm not sure I'll ever need - but I haven't tried Flow yet which might even be better :-)

One weird thing about Sidesync: I found it in the Google Play Store, clicked on it, gave it the permissions it wanted and it downloaded it. I clicked on the Open button, used it satisfactorily, then closed it. Then I went to use it again and there's no icon anywhere that I can find to launch it. Why is that? (If I'm still in the Play Store, I can just click Open again and it runs but shouldn't I have an icon on my desktop??
 
Dannydet said:
Look in the app drawer.
Long press the icon and move to your desktop
Click to expand...

When you say "look in the app drawer", I assume you mean that I should press on the leftmost of the three buttons along the bottom of the phone bezel. That's the one that shows all the tasks currently running on the phone so I assume that's what you mean by the app drawer. (Sorry, I don't know all the terminology that I should know.)

When I do that, one of the tasks is the play store and I'm on the page that says Sidesync, which offers me an Uninstall option and an Open option. Is that the right place to be? If so, I'm not having any luck with long presses: I don't see any way to move the app icon to my desktop.

In fact, I've managed to bugger myself up slightly: I opened a split screen view where my app list is in the bottom half and the Sidesync icon is in the top half. I can't figure out how to get out of split screen view! .... Wait, I finally figured it out! I'm out of the split screen.

Okay, I've long-clicked on the Sidesync icon on the Google Play page that I mentioned earlier; now my app drawer contains a huge full screen version of the Sidesync icon. Pressing on it, long or short, does nothing. There's still no new icon on my desktop for Sidesync.

What am I doing wrong? Sorry to be such a dumbass....
 
Swipe up on the homescreen. It should take you to the app drawer. Look for Sidesync there. The button you pressed before is the recent apps button.
 
Okay, I've swiped up and now see the real app drawer ;-)

Sidesync wasn't there so I went back into Play Store (via the recent apps) and saw it still open on the Sidesync page; I clicked on Open, then swiped up for the app drawer but still no Sidesync, not even in the Samsung folder....
 
I managed to solve my problem. It turns out all of the information I was given above was fine; it was just missing one small but critical detail.

When I swiped up, Sidesync was absolutely NOT in the list of apps in the app drawer. But something I didn't notice the other day when I was trying to get it on my desktop was there is a search box at the top of the app drawer. A moment ago, I noticed *that*, typed in sidesync and bingo: there it was! Then I was finally able to long click it and put it on my desktop just as I'd wanted.

I'm not sure *where* Sidesync was hiding and why it didn't show up when I swiped up but, wherever it was, the search found it and now I'm good to go!

Thanks to all who helped!
 
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