One clipboard shared between your Android phone and your Mac, over your own network. Copy on one, paste on the other. Text, links, images and files.
Nothing leaves your local network. There is no account, no server and no cloud. The two devices find each other by themselves and keep working after a reboot, a new Wi-Fi network or a changed IP address.
The Mac side lives in synco-macos.
Both devices announce themselves on the local network and connect directly. The connection is encrypted end to end, and you confirm a short fingerprint once per device so nobody else can pair with you.
Everything about how the two sides talk is written down in PROTOCOL.md, which is identical in both repositories.
Since Android 10, an app can only read the clipboard while it owns the window you are looking at. That was done to stop apps snooping on what you copy, and it applies to Synco too. There is no permission a normal app can ask for to get around it.
Synco offers two ways to live with that. Accessibility is the default.
Accessibility service. When Synco notices you may have copied something, it puts an invisible one-pixel window on screen for a few milliseconds. That makes Android treat Synco as the focused app for an instant, long enough to read the clip, and then the window goes away.
It works on any phone with nothing else installed. The costs are real and worth knowing:
- Focus flickers to Synco for an instant on each copy.
- It has to guess when you copied, because Android does not tell a background app that the clipboard changed. Most copies are caught; an occasional one is not.
- Google Play does not allow the accessibility API to be used this way, so Synco is not on Play and is installed by hand.
Shizuku, optional and more reliable. Shizuku lets an app borrow the same level of access a computer has over USB. With it, Synco reads the clipboard directly: no invisible window, no focus flicker, no guessing, and nothing missed.
The trade is that you install Shizuku and start it again after each reboot, using wireless debugging or a rooted phone.
Choose Shizuku if you want it to simply work. Choose accessibility if you would rather not install anything else. If you pick Shizuku and it later is not running, Synco falls back to accessibility and tells you why.
Starting Shizuku from your Mac. Because Shizuku stops at every reboot, Synco can ask your Mac to start it for you. Plug the phone in with USB debugging on, turn the option on in Synco's settings on the Mac, and a button appears on the phone. It runs one fixed command and nothing else, and only a device you have already paired can ask.
Grab the APK from Releases and install it. Android will warn about installing outside the Play Store, which is expected: Synco cannot be on Play, for the reason above.
To build it yourself:
export JAVA_HOME=/path/to/jdk-21
./gradlew assembleDebug
adb install -r app/build/outputs/apk/debug/app-debug.apkmacOS ships without a JDK, so JAVA_HOME has to point at one. Built and tested
with JDK 21.
- Open Synco on the phone and on the Mac.
- Turn Clipboard sync on.
- Each device offers to pair with the other. Approve on both, and check the four-block fingerprint matches. That check is what stops someone else on the network pairing with you.
- Turn on Synco clipboard access when asked, or switch to Shizuku.
Direction. Per device, in four combinations: both ways, phone to Mac only, Mac to phone only, or paused. Text, images and files can each be turned on and off separately in each direction. Changing this on either device changes it on the other, and a change made while disconnected is applied on the next connection.
Where received files go. By default files land somewhere you cannot browse.
Pick a folder and they land there instead, with a notification each time. Android
will not let you pick Download or the storage root itself, so open one and pick
a folder inside it, or make a new one.
Largest file. Anything bigger is refused in both directions. Each device has its own limit and the smaller of the two wins. Pick No limit if you would rather it never refuse anything.
Capture tuning. How long to wait for the clipboard, how long to wait for focus, and how many times to re-read after a tap. Raise these if copies are missed on a slower phone; lower them if Synco feels intrusive.
Home is what has moved between your devices, newest first. Service has the switches and your paired devices. Settings has everything else.
Large transfers show their progress in a notification, and on Android 16 and later it is a Live Update, so it stays on the lock screen and in the status bar while it runs. Older versions get an ordinary progress notification. Both devices report their own progress to each other, so the phone shows how much the Mac has actually taken, not just how much was sent.
- Copies are missed. Turn on Synco clipboard access, or switch to Shizuku. Raising the capture tuning values helps on slower phones.
- The devices cannot see each other. They must be on the same network, and some routers stop devices talking to each other. Guest networks usually do.
- It stops when the screen is off. Exempt Synco from battery optimisation.
- A file did not arrive. It is probably larger than the limit on one of the two devices.
MIT with an attribution clause. See LICENSE. You are free to use, change and redistribute Synco, including in your own products, as long as you credit the original author somewhere a user or reader can find it.
Made by OneAboveAll1964.