Automatic clipboard syncing across devices no longer functioning on Android 13

Android 13 landed on Pixel devices on August 15th and brought a long list of new features and improvements, including app-specific languages, improved connectivity with ChromeOS, expanded Material You colour options, cinematic wallpapers, and more.

On the other hand, the introduction of the new OS has broken some things that worked optimally in the past, primarily, the ability for your clipboard to automatically sync with other devices using applications like Join and Pushbullet, first reported by AndroidPolice.

Just found the first major Android 13 regression that will very negatively affect me – clipboard sync from the phone to other devices (using @joaomgcd's Join, for example) stopped working.

Google will not be fixing it. 🫤https://t.co/v8gMISVTCihttps://t.co/A80jvISzMZ

— Artem Russakovskii (@ArtemR) August 16, 2022

The Join app, in essence, allows you to sync your clipboard across your phone, your desktop and/or browser, allowing you to send text seamlessly from one device to the other. The feature works perfectly on devices running Android 12 or lower, but seems to be losing support on Android 13 due to a change in permissions that complicate accessing device logs. According to AndroidPolice, the Join app now would have to send a prompt every time it has to read the device logs, and the app needs to be running in the background to function.

Image credit: Mishaal Rahman

The app is still working; that is, it can still send clipboard text over to other devices, but instead of it being automatic, users are currently having to copy the text they want to send over, share it via the clipboard and then share via Join.

While Join developer João Dias has confirmed that he has started working on streamlining the manual syncing process on Android 13, Google has already made it clear via a Google Issue Tracker entry that “Disallowing background access is working-as-intended” and that it won’t revert back to its old ways. “We would discourage any type of automation testing relying on logcat. Trying to communicate with logcat without an interaction with the developer/users are not intended use case,” reads the entry.

Senior Technical Editor for Esper, Mishaal Rahman, did share a workaround using the Shizuku library, to give higher app permissions to applications like Join on Android 13, though it requires you to apply the workaround on every boot. You can read more about it here.

One workaround is to elevate privileges to shell level, as the shell user is still able to send the logcat command without having to ask the user for one-time access each time. Apps can do this using the Shizuku library, as explained by @Wander1236. https://t.co/YWRG3K3gVG

— Mishaal Rahman (@MishaalRahman) August 17, 2022

Source: AndroidPolice