A family member recently had an accident with their phone, causing the screen to break, touch to stop working and the screen to go partially black (actually it started out just in the broken corner,
gradually spread outwards as time progressed).
First things first:
I am no expert, nor even remotely trained at phone repairs, do not use this as a repair guide and please use your own judement on what to do if you want to try the same on your own. This is simply a log of what I did, with all the potential
errors that may contain. I accept no liability of your endevours based on information contained herein
Controlling a phone with partially broken screen #
The first thing that went through my mind (but maybe not the phone’s owner); what is the backup status of photos and other?
It turns out, that for reasons, automatic backup had been paused for quite a while, so the first thing to do was to ensure that we saved photos and important iformation from the phone. On Android, when you connect it to a computer the default (only?) behaviour is that it does not allow for copying of files, you have to manually allow for that through the OS.
The problem, naturally, is that without a functioning input you cannot allow the USB connection to transfer out files…
The rescue is called On-The-Go (OTG), which is a suppliment specification to the USB, which allows the phone to act as a host for USB devices. On Modern Android, it appears to be enabled by default, and allows you to connect a mouse or a screen to the phone, and using that as input device/screen.
My problem at the time was that I did not have a USB-C mouse, USB-C to USB adaptor or a mouse for that matter, only my laptop, and because the “blackness” of the screen was slowly spreading to consume the entire screen, I was on the clock.
SCRCPY #
After using the google on the internet machine, i came across SCRCPY. This is a software which let’s your computer act as an OTG device, displaying the screen on your computer and controlling the phone with your mouse. The downside; your phone needs to have USB debugging enabled, something which it usually does not have by default, in order to view the screen.
Mouse control will however work without having USB debugging enabled, so with the partially visible screen, I was able to enable developer mode, and turn on usb debugging.
Once screen and control was gained, it was easy to re-enable backup of the phone.
Screen Replacement #
The owner of the phone thought it best to purchase a new phone, which gave me an excellent oportunity; Try to perform the screen replacement myself.
I have for some time been semi-looking for a used/broken Google Pixel phone, that I could repair, and then try running GrapheneOS on, and by some kind of miracle the phone in front of me was just that, a broken Google Pixel where the owner had moved on to another phone.
Stars Aligned.
I went to a local repair shop and conviced them to sell me just the replacement screen, found my repair toolkit and went to the iFixit Guide ,read through it a few times, studied the pictures and found my tools.
The work basically starts out by you having to apply heat to the top of the phone, in order to start prying the screen loose using a pick or ar jimmy knife.
I quickly found that I was too conservative in applying heat, and when the repair guide says to “warm the top edge” so the glue softens, I think maybe I should have applied heat all around the whole phone, because I quickly found that it was really difficult to get the edge of the screen to loosen from the phone.
In fact, I broke the entire screen (as in fractured the glass significantly) while trying to loosen the first top corner, making it a nightmare to remove the screen. For a while I tried getting it off by removing glass shard by glass shard, untill I finally grew tired and more or less just dragged the entire screen off by jamming my fingers under the loose edge and pulling it loose by sheer force.
The backside of the phone appeared to have come from the rather brutal screen removal without too many marks, so I replaced the tape, cleaned up the glass shards
and wiped the entire edge well with some isopropanol to remove any glue residues and or fat from my fingers.
Hooking up the new screen was relatively easy, and it was surprisingly easy to seat the new screen at the correct location.
The feeling of turning it on and seeing the google logo on the screen was well worth the time spent prying off the fractured old screen.
After installing the fingerprint calibration software, the fingerprint reader worked as normal.
The only thing I have detected as not working is the proximity sensor, which means that the phone does not register that I put it close to my ear. I only discovered this a few days later, and upon investigating the old screen, I noticed a sort of plastic shield stuck to it, which I suspect should have been moved and placed around the proximity sensor rather than being stuck on the old screen. Right now I am not too keen on trying to pry off the screen again to refit this shield, but maybe sometime in the future!
Next step #
Stay tuned for the next post on this topic, where I detail out the steps taken to install and configure GrapheneOS on the phone.