Access A Locked Android Phone With A Cracked Screen

The only real downside to a touchscreen phone is when something happens to that screen. Sure, having to constantly wipe fingerprints off it can be a pain but it doesn’t stop you being able to use it. A broken screen can. If you would like to know how to access a locked Android phone with a cracked screen read on.

This happened to me a couple months ago when I dropped my Nexus 5 so I can say confidently that either of these methods work. If you have USB debugging running on your phone, you can use the Android Debug Bridge to access the data on your phone. If you don’t have debugging enabled, you will have to use a USB On the Go Mouse. This will only work if the screen is cracked and not responding to input but still displaying. Otherwise you’re out of luck.

Access a locked phone with a cracked screen with Android SDK
1. Download and install the Android SDK package.
2. Download the correct USB drivers for your phone from the manufacturer’s website.
3. Open a command prompt window as an administrator (Windows PC) and type or paste ‘cd Candroid/platform-tools’. Don’t close the window.
4. Connect your device to the PC using the USB cable.
5. Type or paste ‘adb device’ into the CMD window. Your phone should be detected if it wasn’t already.
6. Type or paste ‘adb shell input text PIN' hit Enter and then ‘Shell input keyevent 66’ and hit Enter again. Where you see PIN, add your phone’s PIN code.
7. Copy across all the data you want to access on the phone.

Access a locked phone with a USB On the Go Mouse
If you don’t have USB debugging, you will find this method useful. You will need an On The Go adapter and a USB mouse for it to work though. As above, this assumes your screen isn’t responding to touch input but is still displaying data.

1. Make sure your device has plenty of charge
2. Connect the mouse, adapter and phone together.
3. Use the mouse to move the cursor on the device’s screen to unlock the phone.

Now you should have access to the phone to either enable USB debugging or to activate Google Sync to back up your stuff. Alternatively, connect the phone to your PC and copy manually.

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