Phone Hub will soon let you stream your messaging apps (and more) to your Chromebook
Google I/O 2022is rife with feature announcements promising tighter integration between Android phones and tablets, Chromebooks, and Wear OS watches, to name a few. While it’ll take some time to achieve connectivity as seamless as Apple’s ecosystem, the small improvements do add up. Aside fromMatter for the Google Home ecosystemandscreencasting for Chromebooks and cars, Google’s supercharging the Phone Hub on Chromebooks for a better messaging experience.
If you use Google Messages on your Android phone,Phone Huballows you to access and send texts from your Chromebook — either via direct interaction with a new message notification or through the Messages PWA pre-installed on most Chromebooks. However, with the arrival ofAndroid 13this Fall,Google saysit will expand the program’s capabilities to more platforms, allowing you to manage conversations from different messaging apps. Unlike the current experience, this will not require a PWA. Instead, it’ll work by streaming these apps from your phone straight to your Chromebook.
But that’s not all that’s new to Phone Hub. Soon after the UI arrived last year, we also tracked a possible augmentation that would allow users toview their phone’s screen right on their Chromebooks. Google said it was working on the casting feature during CES 2022. Its functionality waseventually demonstratedand that opened up the prospect of streaming apps to Windows and Mac computers.An I/O announcement on Google’s corporate blogsuggests that the new Phone Hub experience could be closer than ever. Android 13 will also see the company improve the connectivity between Android phones and tablets, allowing you to copy and paste URLs and photos between them.
As the number of smart gadgets we use increases, Google says it’ll continue to work with its partners to make multi-device connectivity as seamless as possible.
UPDATE: 2022/05/14 09:58 EST BY JULES WANG
Additional details
We’ve updated this article with additional details from Google.
Broader branding hints at wider paid-tier ambitions
The note-taking app I should have used all along
All for better imaging
Keep privacy a priority with the best VPNs
It’s $30 off for a limited time
Some scary urban digital legends
