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I'm looking for guidance on how to achieve (build) the following:

  1. I have a native App (supported on both Android and iOS)
  2. I have a user 'A' who has the app installed on his phone.
  3. I want another user 'B' to be able to remotely (on a browser) be able to "view" or "take control" of the app being used by user 'A'. So, User A could say "Share with User B" and User B starts seeing a virtual view of the app on User A's phone, and follows as User A navigates around the app.

Basically, some sort of screen sharing on phone, but only limited to my app.

Note that I do not want the user 'A' to install any separate app to share my app. It should be a capability existing/built within my app itself.

Seraphim's
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Saket
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  • You will have much better luck asking separate Stack Overflow questions for android and ios, rather than combining them into a single question. – CommonsWare Jun 26 '14 at 15:36
  • I'm hoping I can build it in a way that is reusable across the platforms. Maybe not? – Saket Jun 26 '14 at 15:38
  • Your item #1 implies that it is not cross-platform. If you intend to use some cross-platform framework for item #1, you need to state **specifically** what it is. – CommonsWare Jun 26 '14 at 15:42
  • I'm sorry but what "specific" info are you looking for? Are you looking for what the app is? If yes, I'm not quite sure how would that help, though. – Saket Jun 26 '14 at 16:00
  • "I'm sorry but what "specific" info are you looking for?" -- as I wrote, I am looking for the specific cross-platform framework that you plan to use to write your app. – CommonsWare Jun 26 '14 at 16:01
  • I'm open on that. And would like to hear what frameworks could we use – Saket Jun 26 '14 at 16:03

3 Answers3

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To achieve your goal there are smaller problems to take care about, from screen change detection to P2P communication between network nodes.

For iOS there's a Hierarchy Viewer github project that setups HTTP service on device, allowing to preview snapshots of app window using a web browser. Making use of that, you'd still need custom protocols to notify about user touch events and screen changes, which in turn requires effective screen change detector.

Note that this solution assumes no NAT stays between controlling and controlled devices, which is usually a case for local networks. To use the Internet as a medium, you should consider P2P protocols capable of NAT traversal (reffer to STUN protocol for endpoint address recognition and hole punching as a NAT traversal technique).

zakol
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As a suggestion, how about this? Please note I'm not into this myself, so I might be suggesting something very hard to do.

  1. Create a website that shows the same information as the phone
  2. Make the app have a "server" component
  3. Have the website authenticate and connect to the phone
  4. Have the phone to send over the data from the app to the website, which can then show it in the appropriate fields/positions.
Master-Guy
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I think what you're looking for is some kind of VNC-like server that would be integrated into your application and serves the content of your application ui on the network. It should be technically feasible, yet it certainly won't be easy !

There are several VNC servers for android ; most but not all requires root access though, probably because they serve the phone screen and not one specific application.

Pierre Rust
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