Mirror/visualisation on Android (and local)

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1

Did anyone find an option now to visualise artboards on Android?

I’ve recently noticed Crystal app has stopped working, it doesn’t seem to be connecting to/detecting Sketch anymore.
(Crystal did for Android what the old Mirror app did for iOS, it wasn’t developed by Sketch)

I knew this was coming having read the news about how Mirror support was ending. Crystal was never perfect, and failed to connect often, but it was the way I had to visualise my artboard and prototypes on my phone. Something very important to me when designing for mobile.

The new app (View and Mirror) is again not available for Android, and I haven’t found any other options so far. The only workaround I’ve come up is to open sketch.com on my phone, and try to view prototypes full screen there. But I can only see prototypes, and the update are really slow. It’s ok for testing at the end, but doesn’t really work during design, it’s cumbersome.

I seem to understand that Sketch doesn’t ‘broadcast’ locally the file contents anymore, instead the new app seems to rely on it’s own rendering engine and the cloud? So Crystal doesn’t see this anymore? I bet this is gonna make it very difficult for someone to come with an app for Android on their own.

Also the new mirror app, even if I had an iOS device, would force me to save my files to the cloud instead of working locally. Something I’d really prefer not doing, being disconnected often, and mostly the reason keeping me from moving to Figma.

Thanks for your help.

2

Hi @Jean-Francois-b

Thanks for taking the time to share this. I understand your concern. I used to have an Android phone too.

I still have my old phone around, it’s a Motorola motog(7), quite old by now, and it seems the issue comes from Android, it’s possible that Crystal is not compatible with the latest Android versions, because my moto g(7) can still connect to Sketch through Crystal, both with versions 99.5 and the latest beta version.

Being an old phone, it doesn’t run the latest version of Android, I’m running Android 10.

Here’s a screenshot taken just some minutes ago

krystalMirror
krystalMirror1080×2270 302 KB

An option, at least for now, could be to have an Android device running on an earlier version. I know it’s not ideal, but it can help for now.

And just in case, make sure that both your Android device and Sketch are on the same network and avoid running beta and final versions at the same time. Also, sometimes you need to quit and relaunch Sketch for Crystal to pick it up.

I hope this helps :pray:

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3

Hi Jorge,

Thanks for your answer! Very appreciated.

Well that is interesting, and it pushed me to do more testing. It was the macOS Crystal app that wasn’t recognizing Sketch, trying to connect over usb. But with more restarting of Crystal, Sketch and usb connection I made it work! I did say that it was always fiddly. :sweat_smile:

I also wrongly assumed that because support for Mirror was dropped it had broken Crystal.

Thanks again! That’s really neat for me as I can keep testing locally.