So you can take screenshots when your mobile app does not allow it

If Android phones have been characterized by anything over the years, it is by offering the user complete freedom of customization and the ability to do almost anything, sometimes natively and other times through apps.

It’s rare to find some kind of limitation in Google’s operating system, and when we do come across one, it’s almost always due to security or privacy concerns.

This happens with those applications that protect what appears on the screen so that we cannot take a screenshot of it, something that sometimes makes no sense, since we are not talking about applications where any type of transcendent or sensitive information to the user.

For this reason, it can be the case that it is very necessary to take that image capture, something that would not be possible a priori, but we are going to explain how to do it. you can bypass these restrictions.

Why are screenshots limited?

As we told you before, it is normal for developers to limit screenshots for privacy or security reasons, although there are applications in which this concept is not entirely correct and this possibility is cut off without much sense.

Most of the banking and payment apps block screens for security reasons, something normal and completely understandable.

Chrome blocks screenshots in its tabs and incognito windows for privacy reasons, which is also completely understandable, since it doesn’t make much sense to be in the most private part of this browser and be able to take screenshots on your mobile.

In any case, we are going to be indifferent to why the developers decided to limit screenshots of a certain application, since there are several methods that will allow us to perform this action.

Today we are going to show you two different methods, an easy one that works in some cases and a more advanced one that should always work.

First method: Google Assistant

The way to block the screenshots of many applications is by disabling the capture button combination of our phone.

How can you imagine, if instead of this method you use a resource other than pressing the keys of your smartphone, then you can capture without problems.

The Google Assistant is an app built into the vast majority of Android phones that allows you to capture the screen. We tell you how to do it.

we open the application we want to capture. We activate the Google Assistant and say Hey Google! or hold the start key depending, something that will depend on how we configured it. At that time we can write or use the voice to say Take a screenshot. The Google Assistant will now take a screenshot.

We are not going to deceive you, this method has little chance of success, since most of the programs that are serious about blocking screenshots and therefore already predicted this method.

It may be that there is no other choice but to opt for the second option to capture the screen.

Second method: use scrcpy

scrcpy is a screen mirroring program that allows us to see and control the screen of our Android phone on the computer.

The idea is that the moment we see the smartphone screen on the computer, we take a screenshot with the computer as we normally do. Print the Print key pants, for example.

scrcpy is available on Windows, macOS and Linux, although the first thing to do is to install Scoop, a command-line installer for Windows, on your computer.

we open Windows PowerShell and write the same thing in the start menu and select Administrator mode as soon as it appears on the screen. Inside PowerShell we write the code below: iwr -useb get.scoop.sh | iex iwr is short for Invoke Web Request in English. This command starts a session to access something on the Internet. This command line will download and install Scoop. We press Get and PowerShell will install Scoop.

Once we’ve done that, we need to download scrcpy to continue.

When we have it, the steps to follow are the following:

we open the symbol of the system search cmd in the Start menu. At this moment we run the following command: scoop install scrcpy

Now that we have scrcpy installed, the next step would be to prepare our phone.

We need to enable USB Debugging on our Android device. If we don’t have it, we have to go to the settings of the terminal, enter phone information and press the build number several times in a row until it tells us that we already have the developer options.

Once this is done we can proceed to install scrcpy.

Let’s go to the settings of the phone. We scroll down and look for developer options. If it doesn’t appear, it may be within the system normally. We press the switch next to USB Debugging to enable it. We connect the phone to computer usb. we open the symbol of the system. Write the command scrcpy and we press Enter. A window will open and we will be able to see the phone’s screen, which means we will be able to capture its screen.

The truth is that there are some steps, especially this second method, but it is worth it if we need to capture what the smartphone screen shows.

The screenshots on the mobile are guaranteed, even though they are limited by the application as you just read, something that can be of great help.