While Chrome OS users can connect their Android phones to their computers to send text messages and use their phone as an automatic wi-fi access point, certain features are missing. Compared to the Windows 10 Your Phone app, it doesn’t integrate as deeply with your phone with features like managing photos and playing music. Some Samsung phones can copy / paste to multiple devices and allow you to view your device’s screen on your PC. My Samsung Galaxy Note 9 does this perfectly.
But 9to5Google reports that Chrome OS could be getting an Android Phone Hub, an improved version of what they already offer, with features very similar to the Windows 10 Your Phone application. A code change seems to point to this with a reference to a new ‘phone hub’.
Enable Phone Hub
Provides a user interface for users to view information about their Android phone and perform phone-side actions within Chrome OS
# enable-phone-hub
Going deeper, this code change also references new notifications, a notification badge, and task continuation. Like Windows 10 Your Phone, it looks like you will be able to manage your phone notifications from Chrome OS, and you might get an alert on your computer screen every time someone sends you text messages, Facebook messages or something similar. With Windows 10 Your Phone, you can select which applications you want to notify you on your PC. However, it is unclear where the notification badge will appear in Chrome OS.
As for the task continuation, this could allow Chrome OS and Android to start a task on one device and then continue where they left off on the other. Users already have the ability to do this with things like Google Docs, but since this Phone Hub will focus on better integration between Chrome OS and Android, I envision something like starting a text on your phone, then finishing it and sending it to your la Computer is not out of scope. (You can’t do that on Windows 10 Your phone).
This is obviously not something that Google has confirmed or even mentioned. However, Google already allows you share web pages between the Chrome browser on your PC and the Android device, and vice versa, so it would be nice to have more integrated features that work like Windows 10 Your App. As 9to5Google points out, it is strange that Google is behind this compared to Windows, but hopefully it will catch up soon.
G / O Media may receive a commission
.
