Use your Android phones or tablets as a second monitor/speaker for your Linux PC, over USB or Wi-Fi. Several devices can be connected at once.
Click a badge to open the latest release, then pick the .AppImage or .apk file under Assets.
- Low-latency H.264 video (hardware encoding via VAAPI)
- USB (Android Open Accessory, no ADB needed) or Wi-Fi with TLS and PIN pairing
- Touch, multi-touch gestures and pressure/tilt stylus input
- Extend, mirror, or use the phone as your main screen
- Laptop audio on the phone, phone microphone to the laptop, synced across devices
- Clipboard sharing and file transfer
- Phone battery on the host, per-device settings
- Optional automatic screen scaling for the phone's monitor (KDE, GNOME); switch it off in the host or in the Android app settings
- KDE Plasma 6 (Wayland)
- GNOME (Wayland). Don't use the display-switch key (F4) while streaming; it can crash gnome-shell (a mutter bug). Change roles in the app instead.
- X11 desktops (Cinnamon, XFCE, MATE, ...)(not 100%)
- COSMIC: partial(mirror only)
- Windows host: written, never tested
- Sway, Hyprland and other wlroots compositors: not supported yet
Tested so far on one machine, so other GPUs and drivers may need fixes.
Download the latest packages and the Android app from the Releases page:
| Platform | File |
|---|---|
| Arch / CachyOS / Manjaro | displayswarm-*.pkg.tar.zst (sudo pacman -U file) |
| Debian / Ubuntu | displayswarm_*_amd64.deb (sudo apt install ./file) |
| Any Linux | DisplaySwarm-*.AppImage (chmod +x and run) |
| Android 8+ | DisplaySwarm-*.apk |
The Android app checks the Releases page when you open its Settings and tells you when a newer version is out. It opens the download page; it never installs anything by itself.
Then start DisplaySwarm on the PC, open the app on the phone and connect by USB cable or pick the PC in the list over Wi-Fi. On Wi-Fi a firewall may block the phone; the host has an "Open firewall port" button for ufw/firewalld.
The .pkg.tar.zst and .deb packages install a udev rule that lets your logged-in user open a phone in Android accessory mode (18d1:2d00-2d05). Without it, USB only works while USB debugging is on, because systemd grants access only to the accessory modes that include an adb interface. With debugging off the host gets "permission denied" and never reaches the app.
The AppImage cannot install it, so create the rule once and replug the phone (this needs no copy of the repo):
echo 'SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTR{idVendor}=="18d1", ATTR{idProduct}=="2d0[0-5]", TAG+="uaccess"' \
| sudo tee /etc/udev/rules.d/70-displayswarm-aoa.rules
sudo udevadm control --reloadThe rule only grants access to the logged-in user while the phone is plugged in, and does not affect the phone's normal (MTP) mode. If USB still does not connect, the host log (journalctl --user -u displayswarm-hostd) says "permission denied opening the phone".
The host window on the PC: connected devices on the left, the selected device's role, live stats and settings on the right. It follows the desktop's light or dark theme.
The Android app, choosing what the device does (mirror, extend, mirror one window, drawing tablet, input pad):
# Host (Rust, Slint UI). Needs ffmpeg, x264, pipewire, opus dev libraries and clang.
cd host && cargo build --release # binaries: displayswarm, displayswarm-hostd
# Android app (JDK 17, Android SDK)
cd client-android && ./gradlew assembleDebug
# Packages
cd packaging/arch && makepkg -f # Arch package
packaging/debian/build-deb.sh # .deb
packaging/appimage/build-appimage.sh # AppImageTests: cargo test in host/, ./gradlew testDebugUnitTest in client-android/. Tagging vX.Y.Z builds and publishes every package through GitHub Actions.
If DisplaySwarm is useful to you, please star the repo and tell others. More fixes and desktop support are coming. Bug reports and pull requests are welcome.
GPL-3.0. Third-party notices are in NOTICE.