After
killing off Windows 10 Mobile, Microsoft has been improving
its mobile apps for iOS and Android. Microsoft doesn’t
intrinsically own these platforms, but the software giant’s new
strategy appears to seed its apps and services everywhere it
could.
Windows 10’s Your Phone app is Microsoft’s latest attempt to
bridge the gap between PCs and Android devices. Previously,
Microsoft tried to bridge the gap between the two form factors
by projecting Windows 10 Mobile OS and apps onto desktops, but
Microsoft has gone the other way with Your Phone app.
Windows 10’s Your Phone app currently allows users to reply to
traditional text messages, access phone’s camera roll directly
on the desktop, mirror the phone’s screen onto your monitor,
and also make calls via the PC.
Microsoft is now working on the next big feature for Windows 10
that could further integrate both operating systems.
The latest build of Microsoft Your Phone app revealed multiple
mentions of a new Content Transfer feature. References to
‘SharedContentPhotos,’ ‘ContentTransferCopyPaste’, and
‘ContentTransferDragDrop’ were spotted in the codebase.
We were able to enable the Content Transfer option in Your
Phone app with a hack, but the feature
doesn’t seem to work yet.
As you can see the above screenshot, ‘Cross-device copy and
paste’ option showed up in Your Phone app after we enabled
Content Transfer flags. The description states that some
metadata will be transferred between devices each time
‘content’ is copied on phone or PC.
It suggests that Microsoft may soon allow you to transfer files
such as documents or even other contents from your Android
device to Windows 10 or vice versa.
There are already plenty of ways to transfer contents from
phones to Windows PC, including Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud
storage platform. However, Your Phone app’s content transfer
feature would be different as Microsoft plans to enable
seamless and closer integration.
Your Phone app was originally released in 2018 and Microsoft is
improving the app to potentially increase its brand
presence on mobile. There is also Microsoft Launcher and Link
to Windows apps which enables “Continue on PC” experience for
Android phones, and the company is planning to launch its own
Android dual-screen device in 2020.
