No phone preview (a tile with no picture)

The phone is visible in the grid, but instead of live video you get an empty tile or an endless “Loading preview”. First the reassuring part: tasks do not need the picture, warmup and publishing run without it. Still, running a farm blind is uncomfortable, and the cause is usually fixed in a couple of minutes - work through the steps below.

How preview works

Lusiesta shows the phone screen through one of two engines: a hardware video stream or screen capture via the Siesta agent (APK). The software checks by itself which engine works on a given model and remembers the choice. For agent capture, Android asks for screen recording permission once - that is a system dialog on the phone itself.

The second thing worth knowing: only what is visible on screen gets decoded. Tiles scrolled out of view are stopped entirely, which frees up the computer’s CPU, the USB bus and the phone itself. Broken streams come back automatically, so a brief “Loading preview” after scrolling, resizing the window or switching pages is normal behaviour, not a failure. Start worrying only if the message stays for a minute or longer.

Checklist

1. Make sure the device is online: the tile is not in the “Offline” state and USB debugging is authorized. If the phone is offline, start with the connection checklist - with no live ADB there will be no picture in any mode.
2. Update the agent: the “Quick actions” panel on the right → “Initialize agent”. An outdated agent is the single most common cause. The button acts on the selected devices; if nothing is selected and exactly one phone is connected, it takes that one.
3. Look at the phone screen. If a system “Start recording or casting?” prompt is sitting there, the software normally confirms it on its own, but on some models (Samsung S10, for example) the dialog looks different. Tap “Start now” by hand once - the consent is remembered until the phone reboots.
4. Switch the engine manually: “Settings” → the “Interface” tab → the “Grid” section → “Streaming mode”: “Auto”, “APK” or “H.264”. Click “Save” at the bottom of the page; the tiles restart after the mode changes.
5. Refresh the static snapshot: the actions menu on the device card → “Refresh preview”. It is the quickest way to tell whether the phone responds at all.
6. Restart the app: on start it pulls any update by itself, and the choice of working engine is re-checked from scratch.

About the “Auto”, “APK” and “H.264” modes

In Settings this option carries a caption: “How to show phones in the grid. Auto - picks the right one for each device. APK - streaming through the Lusiesta APK. H.264 - a third-party module, may not work on some devices.”

• Auto - the working default: the app tries the hardware stream, falls back to agent capture if that fails, and remembers the result for each phone separately;
• APK - forced agent capture. Helps on handsets where the phone’s built-in video encoder gives up (common on some Samsung models);
• H.264 - a forced hardware stream. Gives a smoother picture where it works, and a black screen where it does not.

If preview fails on only one or two models while the rest are fine, change the mode for those devices only and watch the result - switching to “APK” is usually enough.

The system screen recording prompt

Agent capture relies on the standard Android mechanism, and that mechanism is required to ask a human for permission - no setting and no permission can bypass the dialog. The app looks for the confirm button in the phone’s interface tree (texts such as “Start now”, “Start” or “Allow”) and presses it with a real tap. The dialog looks different across firmwares: on some it is a bottom sheet, on others a dialog in the middle of the screen, so the automation occasionally misses.

What to do: unlock the phone, wait for the dialog and tap the consent button yourself. The consent lasts until the device reboots, so this is not a daily chore. Agent requirements and its permissions are covered in The Siesta input agent.

Picture quality and load on the computer

The same “Grid” section has “Grid tile size” (Last used / Large / Medium / Small) and “Image quality” (Economy / Standard / Sharp). If the preview stutters, lags behind or eats the CPU on a large farm, set “Economy” and small tiles: the picture is still good enough to see what is happening on screen, and the load drops noticeably. Tile size can also be changed right on the “Home” page with the slider.

A dark tile is not a failure

The grid settings include a “Sleep mode” toggle captioned “No activity - the stream goes dark, the PC rests. Tasks run as usual.” Next to it are “Sleep after idle” (30 sec / 1 min / 5 min / 15 min / 1 hour) and “Sleeping tile look” (Last frame / Animation / Nothing). If you stepped away from the computer and came back to dark tiles, that is sleep, not a lost connection: move the mouse or click a tile and the stream comes back up. Sleep has no effect on running tasks whatsoever.

If that did not help

The app sends preview diagnostics to support on its own: we see exactly which step the picture fails at for every phone - the model, the Android version, the agent version and the stream state are all collected. Just give support the device number from the tile and the case is handled quickly, with nothing to gather by hand. You can also attach an export from the “Logs” page covering the time when the preview failed to come up.

This is not a bug

Phones above your plan limit are not shown in the grid - in their place there is a single “Upgrade subscription” tile with the number of hidden devices. If you have connected more phones than your plan allows, extend the license in your account area and the previews will appear.

The preview limit counts live devices only: a phone in the “Offline” state does not take up a slot. How the limit is counted and what else it restricts is explained in Plans and the device limit.