// the find
romannurik/AndroidDesignPreview
Android Design Preview is a tool that lets you mirror a portion of your desktop to your device. Useful for visual designers as well as developers, this tool can help streamline your high-fidelity mockup workflow.
A desktop + Android companion app pair that mirrors a selected region of your screen onto a physical device over ADB, so designers can proof a Photoshop/Sketch mockup at real size and pixel density before it's implemented. It's aimed at Android designers in the pre-vector-drawable, pre-Figma-mirror era who wanted to catch scaling and DPI issues early.
Does one narrow job and the idea is still sound — screenshotting on real glass catches rendering issues an emulator won't. Ships prebuilt ADB binaries for Windows, Mac, and Linux so the desktop side works without a separate Android SDK install. The Mac-specific OSBinder/DefaultBinder split shows some actual care was put into cross-platform screen capture rather than just wrapping a generic screenshot library.
Explicitly unmaintained since 2017 (the repo's own badge says so) — nine years of Android device and display changes it was never tested against. Built with Ant and NetBeans/IntelliJ .form files, there's no Gradle setup, so getting it to even compile today is its own project. Bundled ADB binaries are nearly a decade stale and will likely refuse to talk to any current device or Android Studio's adb. No tests, and the single-screenshot workflow has been superseded by Android Studio's built-in screen mirroring and Figma/Sketch device preview plugins that don't require installing a companion APK.