3mo ago

Can I access my phone with a broken screen?

My phone screen is shattered, totally un-usable. When I plug it into my computer (Linux Mint) it is recognized but I can not enter pin to unlock the screen and also USB debugging is not enabled :(

Is there any way to get the fotos and stuff off the phone?

20 comments

If you have a usb OTG cable/adapter and the phone supports it, you can plug a mouse and keyboard into it and use it like that. I've also used an adapter that outputted to hdmi
- HDMI good idea!
- Depending on the models involved, some phones work with a standard PC USB-C stocking station. You might already have one of these for work.
- How do a mouse and keyboard help if the screen doesn't work? Are you supposed to just guess where the cursor is?
  
  If you can get a usb to hdmi thingy to work too you can peolly work around it
  
  A broken touchscreen doesn't mean you can't see what's on the screen. OP said its "unusable", but we don't know if that just means just the touch is unusable or if the actual LCD/LED is damaged as well.
  Most people have no idea you can use a mouse or keyboard on the phone at all, so they'd consider the touch not working to mean the entire phone is unusable since they can't interact with it the one way they've ever used.
  We just don't really have all the information, we don't need to be making assumptions that could easily be wrong as well and ignore possible easy solutions for their problem.
I recently faced a similar problem with a phone that had its screen slowly turning black after it was accidentally dropped. The process of turning black lasted about two days so I was able to react. First thing I did was remove any device locking method (PIN, face unlock etc) so that this would not get in the way once the screen was completely unusable. I then allowed device debugging via USB and used scrcpy (link to scrcpy on github) to mirror the screen to my Linux PC (and control the device via mouse). Through this, I was able to move any data I still needed away from the device even after the screen was completely black There are precompiled binaries for scrcpy on the GitHub project site.
- Yeah scrcpy is a lifesaver. I have successuflly used scrcpy-GUI (together with an OTG adapter for a mouse) in the past, but my screen was partly usable, so I could see and did not have to do too much adb/fastboot magic.
  If OPs screen is broken and they did not do anything beforehand, I would have no idea how to proceed, since HDMI alternate mode seems (still) not very widespread.
Does your touchscreen still accept input? If it does, you can try locking your screen, pressing the power button (a non-brocken screen would turn on) and hold down both volume buttons to enable Talkback.
Talkback will read aloud what is visible on the screen. If you never configured it, it might be hard to understand depending on your language settings and the talking speed.
But with some patience you should be able to navigate to where you need to and enable the USB datatransfer to backup your data or navigate to the settings menu to enable ADB debugging for a full adb backup.
- Good idea!
If you have the various cables you might be able to connect it to a screen via HDMI and a mouse via USB on-the-go, but otherwise it's gonna have to be a screen replacement. You might be able to get a really cheap one that won't last long, but will let you get data onto a computer.
Its not insurmountably difficult to replace screens on most phones.

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