Remote Management, But Enjoyable

Story time

Once upon a time, there was a family full of non-tech-savvy people. They were desperate for help, treating their phones as enemies and getting stuck in front of login forms because they kept forgetting their “very secure” passwords. The home “hacker” was always there to help, but the issues kept multiplying. Over the years, more and more devices gained “smart” features: speakers, TVs, even the kitchen robot started asking for Wi-Fi passwords. Damn it. As if things couldn’t get worse, the “home hacker” was not a child anymore. Moving out turned quick, boring fixes into long, irritating phone calls, video calls, and shaky WhatsApp pictures. Doom seemed near, but technology came to help.

TLDR

I grew tired of managing my parents’ smart devices via phone calls and TeamViewer, so I developed a process for easy remote maintenance, especially for Android devices.

The Process

I remotely access my home network using a VPN-like solution, then control Android devices using adb over TCP, with video and audio mirroring through scrcpy.

The tools of the job

Tailscale is a recently introduced VPN solution that feels almost too convenient, considering its functionality and ease of use. For our purposes, it allows access to the home network from outside, even when behind notoriously tricky things like firewalls and NAT.

Adb is a tool used to interface with Android devices using USB or TCP. We’ll use the latter option.

Scrcpy is an amazing open source tool that uses adb to provide control, audio, and video for an Android device.

Setup

Tailscale

Visit https://tailscale.com/

You need to create an account and download a client app on, at least, the device you’ll use for remote management and a device in your home local network (this one needs to be a Windows/Mac/Linux machine).

Then you’ll need to set the device at home to act as a subnet router over the routes you prefer, as an example:

tailscale up --advertise-routes=192.168.0.0/24,192.168.1.0/24

This needs to be approved in the Tailscale dashboard, then you are set.

To check if everything is working, connect to the Tailscale network and ping some device in the house using its local IP. Magic, no?

Note: this may seem trivial. VPNs have done this for ages. But when you live under heavy firewalls and CGNATs, having Tailscale work so well, so easily, is truly a dream come true.

Adb

To set it up, just follow the instructions

On the Android device you want to access, enable developer options and USB debugging.

Then, from your computer run

adb connect <your device ip>

You’ll receive a notification on the Android device. Grant access and you are set.

Plus: If you need to upload some files to the device, you can do it via:

adb push <local_device_file_path> <remote_device_destination_path>

Usually, on Android, you want to place files at /sdcard/.

Scrcpy

Install it following the instructions

Then connect via adb to the device you want to manage and simply run

scrcpy

Hopefully, a window will appear with your Android device screen mirrored.

Note: if you are connected via adb to several devices, disconnect from the ones you are not using before calling scrcpy.

The end

That’s all. Hope this helps you too.