Microsoft's Your Phone Companion app
Windows 10’s Your Phone app links your PC with your phone. It works
better for Android users, letting you text from your PC, sync your
notifications, and wirelessly transfer photos back and forth. And soon Screen
mirroring too.
Android Users Get the Best Integration
The Your Phone app may be a powerful and sometimes overlooked part of
Windows 10. If you’re an Android user, you'll use it to text right from your
PC, see all of your phone’s notifications, and quickly transfer photos. If you
have the right phone and PC, you can even use the Your Phone app to mirror your
phone’s screen and see it on your PC.
Unfortunately, iPhone users won’t get any of that. Apple’s restrictions
prevent that level of integration. iPhone users can set up the Your Phone app
to send web pages back and forth between their PCs and phones—and that’s it.
Don’t even ask about Windows phones, which Microsoft gave abreast of the way
back.
Texting from your PC, transferring photos, and syncing notifications all
work immediately on current stable builds of Windows 10. The screen mirror
feature is merely available for a few Windows Insiders immediately, but they
ought to arrive for everybody soon.
How to pear Windows 10’s to Your Phone App
The linking process is simple. The Your Phone app comes installed with
Windows 10, but you'll download it from the shop if you’ve previously
uninstalled it. Launch the “Your Phone” app from your Start menu to urge
started.
Select “Android” and click on “Get started” to link the app to an
Android phone. You’ll be prompted to sign in to the app with a Microsoft
account if you aren’t already signed into your PC with one.
If you aren’t already signed in with your Microsoft account, sign in
when prompted. The setup wizard will ask you to download Microsoft’s Your Phone
Companion app to your Android phone and click on “Continue.”
Launch the Your Phone Companion app on your Android phone and check in
with an equivalent Microsoft account you employ on your PC. Go through the
quick setup process. On the ultimate screen, tap “Allow” to link your PC to
your phone. The text messages and photos from your phone will start exposure
within the Your Phone app.
How To Transfer Photos from Your phone Using Your PC
Your Phone app shows recent photos and screenshots you’ve taken on your
Android phone on Windows 10. The last 25 photos or screenshots you’ve taken
will show up when you click on the “Photos” in the right sidebar.
From there, you can either drag photos to a folder in File Explorer or
right-click and choose “Copy” or “Save as” to move them to your PC. Additionally,
you can select “Share” to send the photo via text or email.
It sounds minor, but avoiding the hassle of connecting your phone to
your PC or jumping through hoops with Google Photos or OneDrive is a feature
that can save a lot of time. Every mobile screenshot in this article went
through this photo transfer process to get from the phone to the PC for
editing.
If you need to transfer an older image, you’ll have to connect your
phone to your PC via a cable, transfer them with a cloud service like OneDrive,
or send them via email.
How to Text From Your Windows 10 PC With an Android Phone
The Your Phone app displays all your text message conversations from
your phone. You can send responses and see incoming text messages all in one
place, similar to MightyText or Pushbullet. Microsoft tried to accomplish this
with Cortana, but it lacked a unifying interface and convenience, and
eventually, the feature was shut down in favor of Your Phone. Your
conversations update to match your phone, so if you delete a thread from your
phone, it will disappear from the PC as well.
Texting from the Your Phone app is straight forward, and the general
layout may remind you of email. Click on “Messages” in the left sidebar, and
you should see all your current text messages. If you don’t, try clicking on
“Refresh.” Click on the message thread you want to respond to (like you would
the subject of an email), and type into “Enter a message” box to respond.
You can also scroll through your text message history if you want to
refer back to an older message. In updated Insider builds, contact pictures you
set on your Android phone will sync to the Your Phone PC app, as seen in the
above image. Microsoft says soon you’ll be able to reply from the Windows
notification that appears when you receive a text, but we weren’t able to test
this.
How to Mirror Your Phone’s Screen to Your PC
The most exciting feature is one most people can’t use—yet. Microsoft is
bringing screen mirroring for Android to your PC. But right now the
requirements are incredibly strict. Not only will you need a specific phone (a
handful of Samsung and OnePlus devices), but you’ll also need a rare Bluetooth
specification on your PC— at least Bluetooth 4.1 and specifically with low
energy peripheral capability. Not every Bluetooth 4.1 device supports low
energy peripheral capability, and you’ll find this specific variant of Bluetooth
on very few PCs. In fact, just one device within the Surface Lineup meets that
qualification: the Surface Go.
Even if you are doing have all this hardware—unlikely—this feature is
merely available on Insider builds of Windows 10 immediately.
Unfortunately, this means very few people are in a position to test the
feature right now, and we haven’t seen the feature in action at all beyond a
few screenshots. But what we’ve seen looks intriguing….
How to Mirror Notifications from Android to Your PC
The Your Phone app will soon be able to mirror notifications from your
Android phone to your PC. Insider testers are already able to preview the
functionality. It will likely appear for everyone in the future release of
Windows 10 in six or twelve months.
Update: Notification mirroring is now available to all Windows 10 users!
Notifications from your Android phone will appear on your PC and
clearing the notification from your PC will clear it from your phone. You can
customize which apps show notifications on your PC, either to limit them to
notifications you care about or prevent doubles.
Unfortunately, all you'll do is obvious the notifications. While more
recent versions of Android allow for notification interactions (like responding
to a message), that functionality isn’t mirrored to your PC.
This is another feature Microsoft previously provided through Cortana
and later removed in favor of this option.
If you’re using an Insider build of Windows 10, you can select
“Notifications (in preview)” and go through the wizard to give the app access
to your notifications. It will prompt you to enable notification access for the
Your Phone Companion app on your Android phone. Click on (“Get Started”) then
click on(“Open Settings for Me”) to continue.
Your phone should automatically open your notifications settings. go
right down to (“Your Phone Companion”) and switch it on.
You’ll receive a prompt to confirm you want to turn on notifications;
tap Allow. The text mentions the ability to configure do not disturb; most apps
create notifications, so they need access to do not disturb settings to work
with it. In this case, Your Phone Companion is just reading the notifications
for displaying elsewhere, so it won’t truly interact with Do Not Disturb mode.
You may want to adjust one more setting. If you have an app on both
Android and PC (like Google Hangouts or Email), then you’ll start seeing double
notifications. The Your Phone PC app gives you granular control of which app
notifications you see. To get there, click on “Settings” in the lower left-hand
corner.
Then scroll down and click on the words “Pick the apps you want notifications
from.” A list of apps will appear, and you can toggle off any that duplicate
notifications your PC already gives you.
Clearing the notifications from Your Phone PC app also from your Android
phone.
Overall the Phone app is an unsung hero of Windows 10. If you haven’t
tried it out yet and you have an Android phone, you should give a chance. You
will be so surprised by what you discover.
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