Remote Control of Mobile Devices in Android Platform

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new architecture for remotely controlling Android devices, enabling efficient device management and testing, with a proof of concept implementation demonstrating its feasibility.

Contribution

It proposes a novel architecture for remote Android device control and provides a functional proof of concept implementation.

Findings

Successful implementation of a remote control system for Android devices

Versatile control via network or USB interfaces

Potential applications in testing, security, and forensic tasks

Abstract

Remote control systems are a very useful element to control and monitor devices quickly and easily. This paper proposes a new architecture for remote control of Android mobile devices, analyzing the different alternatives and seeking the optimal solution in each case. Although the area of remote control, in case of mobile devices, is little explored, it may provide important advantages for testing software and hardware developments in several real devices. It can also allow an efficient management of various devices of different types for performing different tasks, related for example to security or forensic tasks. The main idea behind the proposed architecture was the design of a system to use it as a platform which provides the services needed to perform remote control of mobile devices. As a result of this research, a proof of concept was implemented. An Android application running a group of server programs on the device, connected to the network or USB interface, depending on availability. This servers can be controlled through a small client written in Java and runnable both on desktop and web systems.