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jimu Mirror

Preview Android layouts on real devices live

10x faster than relaunching the app!

Try for free: Mirror for Android Studio

What is Mirror?

Mirror is a tool that makes Android UI developers and designers smile.

Mirror gives you live, on-device previews of layouts that update as you code.

“Mirror” stands for “no More compile-Install-Run to see youR UI changes On Real devices”*

Resource hot-swapping
  • Hot-swap layouts, themes, styles, attributes, assets etc.
  • Preview touch feedback, gestures, animations and other dynamic, interactive elements
  • Preview on multiple devices (see stress testing video)
  • Code layouts in an experimental, iterative style

Sample data
  • Build your UI in a realistic context before coding Java
  • Simple XML to set text, image, visibility and more
  • Populate list and grid views with different item layouts
  • Sample data reside in a dedicated directory and won’t polluate your layout code, nor change the runtime behaviour

Custom views
  • Preview layouts with custom views
  • Hot-swap custom view code after re-compilation
  • Set custom attributes with sample data

Themes and action bars
  • Mirror uses the default theme defined in the manifest
  • Experiment with other themes using sample data
  • Preview action bars: set the icon, title and menus

Android Studio plugin

Configuration free, one-click preview


Apps built with the help of Mirror

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Try Mirror for free

Save 20+ seconds per change, hours per day

Even for a small UI change, it usually takes 20+ seconds to recompile, reinstall and finally check out the app on a device. With Mirror, there’s no waiting. The time saving easily adds up to hours a day. With a tighter feedback loop you can stay focused, stay in flow, and get more work done every day.

Thanks for the awesome app, I can see this will save me HEAPS of time!

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Chris Colborne, Senior Software Engineer at The University of Queensland

Write better UI code

Mirror helps you learn Android layout coding more quickly and write better code. Faster feedback lets you create layouts, themes and animations in an experimental, iterative style. Moreover, with sample data, you can develop the UI and test it on a device before writing the Java plumbing to link it all together. This encourages a greater use of Android’s declarative resource system and a good separation of presentational and behavioral code.

The ability to mock data for my list view with 3 different layout files for the items saved me a tremendous amount of tweaking. I was able to get my designer to sign off on the layouts long before I even wrote my adapter.

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William Best, Android Engineer at VOKAL Interactive


Make designers happy too

Quit back-and-forth spec updates and UI tickets! Sit with your designer, make a change and get feedback in real time. You can create interactive prototypes with just layout and other resource XML code, which can be used in development without adjustment or modification.

We are using it to develop an application for [client name]. …it helped us with doing a basic prototype that ran well enough to show them our concept then get feedback and lay it out live for the executives.

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Ray Mayfield, Android UI Designer
Try Mirror for free