Probably unnecessary at this point.

Nearly every phone today is sold with a USB C port.

"But this phone is older than..."

My Moto Z Play was released in 2016. That phone is now 5 years old. It came with Nougat... and I can mirror the screen with a USB C hub with Built in HDMI. Plug in a mouse and you're done.

No need to leave adb enabled, which is a security hole that can be exploited by unsafe USB ports and bad actors. (Also, police.)

A lot of phones don't have video over the USB C port (eg Google Pixels).

Pixel 5 does. I tried with one recently and noted it only does mirroring, unlike Samsung and Huawei which launch some pseudo desktop OS when plugged in.

Wait, you got video out working with the 2020 Pixel 5? First I'm hearing of this.

Which adapter did you use?

Pixel 4a does not.

Can you unlock it (pin/password I mean, not finger/face) with a keyboard and mouse though?

Yep.

Even did a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qkh4oagFfb8

Got out my old Moto Z Play which was retired. Restarted the phone so I couldn't use fingerprint to unlock.

Plugged in a mouse, clicked pin. Unlocked.

Moto Z Play runs Nougat, stock but rooted. You don't need root to be able to do this nor do you need ADB to be enabled.

Also confirmed to be working on Razer Phone (stock, 9/Pie) and Essential Phone (stock, 10). Also works with Keyboard instead of mouse. Just type in the pin and hit enter.

Pattern unlock will have to be done with the mouse for obvious reasons.

So if your digitizer is completely busted, you can still use a mouse and keyboard. If your display is completely busted, you likely will be able to get video alt mode with USB C out.

I tried it on a few other devices that I had in my pile. Chances are, if it's Micro USB, you won't get video on boot, even with a proper MHL adapter.

* Sony Xperia J (Jelly Bean): Nothing, Micro USB

* Sony Xperia Play (Gingerbread): Nothing, Micro USB

* Marshall London (Lollipop): Mouse and Keyboard Works, Micro USB

* Asus Zenphone 3 Zoom (Nougat): Mouse and keyboard works, USB C

IIRC, Displaylink and OTG support was officially added in Lollipop, so that kind of jives with my experience here. As always, YMMV.

On my android I can enter pin/password per keyboard, or the swipe pattern per mouse. Some early android phones had slide-out keyboards (like a Blackberry), so good support for physical keyboards isn't that surprising. I wasn't expecting the mouse support tough.

It's all standard HID interface these days.

Moto E series doesn't have MHL.

No, adb is still needed.

MHL largely was for MicroUSB. Chances are what you need is a USB to DP or USB to HDMI adapter. Some work in one but not the other and vise versa. In the end however, Moto Es ARE designed to be the most cut down, least featured phone in the Moto line.

You would still be able to use a mouse or keyboard to input a pin or passphrase if the screen was still semi readable.

Also the Pixel ones don't have it (or DP alternate mode), I think. This is why Nexus 5 is still the best Google phone so far.

Pixels support DisplayLink mode.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iw4YJpiBVo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iw4YJpiBVo

The Nexus 5 years produced good phones.

My friends Moto Z Play 2 screen was cracked and stopped working after a hard fall. Phone still powers on and accepts touch input but no display. 2 different hubs do not push video at all, so we’re probably looking at replacing the screen to recover her pics.

Why does a USB C port mean you don't need ADB or help with a cracked screen?

It's bad to leave ADB enabled in general.

With a USB C port, there's a near absolute certainty that you can simply plug in a USB hub with HDMI built in to hook your phone up to a mouse and monitor to get around the cracked screen issue.

The recent versions of Android seem to have gotten way better on ADB security. It seems to generate a keypair on every computer with ADB and require a user with the unlocked phone to authorize the keypair for each device manually. It also auto-revokes authorization if you haven't connected that device with ADB in 7 days by default.

I think the implication is that video output is usually available on these devices.

I had a double whammy of a corroded display connection and a loose usb-c port, meaning recovering data from the phone was a very sensitive and frustrating affair.

See I did that, but got the one-two punch of death.

Cracked screen AND USB-C port failure. No charging or data transfer possible.

Apparently at one time google opted me in for Google Photos, so I have a backup of those, but recent contacts were totally lost.

Still have the board lying around and am tempted to continue tinkering with it... Or would be if I had any clue where to get insight on how to do advanced debugging on why a mobile phone wouldn't even register as connected over USB-C. Assuming some sort of handshake failure.

Or put your data on a microSD card in a slot.

Or preferably use Syncthing or any backup plan.

Data you have in one place is data you don't want.

Isn't rooting it blowing a giant hole in the security model?

There's obviously benefits to doing so, but it has some big costs?

Rooting a phone doesn't give all apps root access. You still need to approve each app.

At the level of running apps, yes. But unless I'm way behind on my rooting tech, all of the usual methods leave the phone in a state where anyone who connects it to a computer via USB can access everything on it. AFAIK, Android has gotten way better at having phones with the stock OS locked down hard, with signed bootloaders, OS level encryption keys stored in secure media, etc, and rooting blows that all away.

> Android has gotten way better at having phones with the stock OS locked down hard

eeeeerm, no. It didn't get better at all. It basically wiped out a vibrant 3rd party android development culture by making it extremely hard for them.

Not sure what you mean there. I'm saying that one is a necessary consequence of the other. If you want to have your phone really locked down tight such that it won't give up everything to anyone who connects a USB cable to it and has a few clever tools, it's inevitably going to be tough to do things like load third-party ROMs and root the phone. And it's going to be really tough to do any of those things and also maintain that security against hostile physical access.

Did you install a custom bootloader to load your ROM and root apps? Cool, but as a consequence of that, anyone who connects a USB cable to your phone can get into anything in it. Does it supposedly have security? Wanna bet the quality of any security in a homemade app vs Google's best efforts?

Isn't no root a giant scam for not allowing you to actually own your device?

All arguments have multiple sides to them.

And set a password as soon as you root it for cryin' out loud.