Use a phone in your browser

Every active rental has a session page on pocketshare.io. Nothing to install: rent a phone and use it from any computer with a current browser.

• Control the screen with your mouse, keyboard or touch screen: tap, swipe, type, paste and use Back, Home and rotate.
• Install an APK by dropping it on the page.
• Open a shell, stream Logcat, and move files to and from the phone.
• Save screenshots and screen recordings.

To open it, choose Rentals › Open live view, or run pocketshare open from the CLI. You can run pocketshare connect for adb and Android Studio at the same time.

Browsers

The live screen uses WebCodecs to decode the phone’s H.264 video. It works in current Chrome, Edge and Safari, and in Firefox 130 or later where the operating system provides an H.264 decoder (Windows and macOS). Other browsers show a message instead of the screen; the Logcat, APK and file panels still work, and pocketshare connect with scrcpy shows the screen on your computer.

Using the screen

To	Do this
Tap, swipe, long-press	Click, drag or hold with the mouse (it acts as a finger); touch screens work with several fingers
Scroll	Mouse wheel or trackpad
Type	Click the screen, then type; Enter, Backspace, arrows and Ctrl shortcuts are sent as keys
Paste text	Ctrl+V (Cmd+V) pastes your computer’s clipboard into the focused field on the phone
Copy from the phone	Copy on the phone; the session page shows Phone clipboard with a Copy button
Back, Home, Recent apps	The buttons under the screen, or right-click for Back and middle-click for Home
Rotate	The rotate button turns the phone to landscape and back (apps locked to one orientation stay as they are)
Screenshot	Screenshot downloads a full-resolution PNG taken on the phone
Save what’s on screen	Save frame downloads the frame shown on the page as a PNG (the video’s resolution)
Record a video	Record, then Stop: the recording downloads as WebM (MP4 in Safari)

Press ? (or Shortcuts at the top of the page) for every keyboard and mouse shortcut.

Video quality is Auto by default: up to 1280 pixels on the long side at up to 4 Mbit/s and 60 frames per second, stepping down automatically when frames start arriving late. You can pick a fixed setting instead, from High (1920 px, 8 Mbit/s) to Data saver (720 px, 0.6 Mbit/s). The line under the screen shows the resolution, frame rate and bandwidth.

Recording the screen

Record captures the live screen in your browser and saves it to your computer when you press Stop, named after the phone and the time. Nothing is uploaded, and a recording uses no extra data: it is made from the video the page already shows. A recording stops and saves by itself at 512 MB or after an hour, and when the live screen stops (for example when the rental ends). Browsers that can’t record video say so; use Save frame, or pocketshare connect with scrcpy --record.

Shell

Open shell starts the phone’s own shell in a terminal on the page, the same as adb shell through pocketshare connect. It runs as the phone’s unprivileged shell user, so there is no root, remount or reboot to the bootloader.

To	Do this
Interrupt a command	Ctrl+C (with text selected, Ctrl+C copies it instead)
Copy	Select text, then Ctrl+Shift+C (Cmd+C on a Mac) or Copy
Paste	Ctrl+V or Shift+Insert (Cmd+V on a Mac), or Paste
End the shell	exit or Ctrl+D at the prompt, or Close shell
Leave the terminal with the keyboard	Shift+Tab (Tab completes names in the shell)

The terminal follows the size of the panel and the page’s light or dark theme, and keeps 5,000 lines of scrollback. Closing the page or ending the rental closes the shell.

Panels

• Shell: see above. It opens only when you press Open shell.

• Logcat streams the phone’s log once you press Start. Filter by level, by text in the tag or message, or to one running app by package name; download what you’ve collected as a text file.

• Install an APK: drop an .apk on the panel or choose one. It uploads with a progress bar and installs with updates and test-only APKs allowed. Split APKs (.apks, .xapk) need adb install-multiple through pocketshare connect.

• Files browses the phone’s storage (starting at /sdcard/Download), uploads into the open folder and downloads files up to 512 MB.

Fold a panel to its title with the arrow at its right; it keeps running, and stays folded the next time you open a session in this browser.

What it costs

The screen, the shell, Logcat, uploads and downloads are data like any other: they count toward the rental’s data used, billed per GB with the phone time. A still screen sends almost nothing; a screen that changes all the time sends up to the video bit rate (about 20–30 MB a minute at Auto, 4–5 MB at Data saver). A shell sends only what you type and what it prints. Recordings and saved frames add nothing. Pause Logcat and close the page when you don’t need them.

Screenshots from your own tools

The same screenshot is available to scripts through the relay with an ordinary adb service: pocketshare connect then adb exec-out screencap -p > shot.png, or, from JavaScript, captureScreenshot() in PocketShare’s relay client. The CLI’s pocketshare screenshot and the MCP server’s screenshot tool take the same screencap PNG.