Is it possible to remotely view a user's device?

Question

I want to make an app where it allows the user to give remote access to viewing their phone (first-person view of user using the phone). Kind of like how tech support can sometimes see what you're doing on your computer to help you with problems. Think "remote desktop for phone" is what I'd like to do.

Does anyone know if this would be possible?

My current idea to do this is screen scraping - somehow take a screenshot of the user's phone (like how DDMS does) every millisecond or something. This seems terribly inefficient though, and again I don't know if it's possible.

Note - the "receiver" of this first-person phone view can be a computer or website or whatever, along as they connect remotely.

Answer 1

It would be possible: extremely difficult, but possible, to implement an Android activity that uses a FrameLayout and hosts another Activity. You could then fetch the image buffer of the FrameLayout as shown here and you'd then have to feed that into a video encoder and stream the output of the encoder to a remote server, but that might work.

Answer 2

I actually wanted to create something like that as well... First of all, it will only work on rooted devices, since access to the "screenshot" (framebuffer) is allowed only to rooted devices.

Now as to reading events from the controlling device - that's easy... The hard part would be to generate these events on the controlled device. But I'm absolutely sure it's possible for rooted devices, as I saw some similar program for Windows which controls the connected device (can't remember its name).

Anyway, the reason I stopped thinking about this app is its complexity and the fact only Rooted devices could be controlled.

Hope this helps