Which Android permission does what when you share your screen

Android splits screen sharing into several permissions that do genuinely different things. Apps ask for them one after another, the prompts look similar, and most people accept all of them without knowing which one is the powerful one.

1. Screen capture — MediaProjection

This is the one that lets an app see your screen. It is deliberately hard to grant silently: Android shows a system dialog that no app can style, fake or bypass, and it names what will be shared. While it is active you get a persistent notification and, on most devices, a coloured status bar indicator.

Two properties worth knowing. From Android 14 the dialog offers Share one app as well as Share entire screen, and choosing a single app is a genuinely useful reduction in exposure. And an app must run a foreground service to keep capturing — which is why you see a permanent notification and why the capture is not something that can quietly continue in the background without any sign.

What it does not grant: the ability to touch anything. Capture is read-only. An app with only this permission can watch and cannot act.

2. Remote control — the Accessibility Service

This is the powerful one, and it is the one to think hard about. Android has no general API for injecting taps and swipes; the only route available to a normal app is an Accessibility Service, which exists so screen readers and switch-access tools can operate the device for people who cannot touch it.

Granting it gives an app the ability to read the content of every screen — including text in other apps — and to perform actions: taps, swipes, text entry, navigation. It is not scoped to one app; it is device-wide and it persists until you turn it off.

Android knows this and makes the prompt deliberately unpleasant: a full-screen warning that spells out what the service can do, buried in Settings rather than offered inline. That friction is intentional. It is also exactly the permission every remote-access scam is trying to obtain — see the call that asks you to install something.

3. Display over other apps — the overlay permission

Lets an app draw on top of whatever else is on screen. Legitimately used for floating controls, a stop-sharing button, or a chat head. Also the mechanism behind tapjacking, where an overlay covers a real button so you think you are tapping one thing while tapping another.

Less dangerous than accessibility, more dangerous than capture. If an app asks for it without a visible floating element to justify it, that is worth a question.

What each permission actually allows

A reasonable stance

1. Capture: grant per session. It re-prompts every time by design. That is a feature, not friction.
2. Accessibility: grant only to an app whose whole purpose is control, and revoke it when you are done. Never grant it because a caller asked you to.
3. Overlay: grant if you can see the floating thing it draws. If nothing appears, ask why it wanted it.
4. Audit occasionally. Settings → Accessibility → Installed services shows everything holding the strongest one. Most people find something there they no longer use.

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