Connecting Your Android Phone to Your Chromebook (Phone Hub Explained)

Were you curious to know what the Phone Hub on your Chromebook is? It simply combines your Android phone and laptop, allowing various features and functions that occur between the two devices.

The configuration only takes a few minutes, so why not do it now?

What is Phone Hub on Chromebook?

With Phone Hub on Chromebooks, you can link your Android smartphone to your laptop on Bluetooth to access certain functions on your phone.

For example, the instantaneous connection will automatically connect your Chromebook to the Hotspot on your phone if a known Wi-Fi network is not available. This facilitates the work because you do not have to access the settings of your phone, to turn on the hotspot, then to return to your Chromebook, to find the Wi-Fi of the Hotspot, then to enter your Hotspot password. Instead, everything happens automatically.

Phone Hub will also allow you to see certain notifications, answer message notifications and even make a ping ping if you can’t find it. Another great utility would be to transfer photos and screenshots of the gallery of your phone to your wireless chromebook.

In addition, Phone Hub (with compatible devices) can even broadcast applications from your Android smartphone to your Chromebook. This is different from the capacity of a Chromebook to execute Android applications natively, as it actually distributes the application from your phone, which means that you have chosen your phone to use the application.

The mirroring of applications is different from the installation of Android applications on a Chromebook because all applications do not support chromebooks, and this also keeps you connected as if you were on your phone. This makes it an ideal option for certain social media platforms, certain games that do not support chromebooks and everything you can think of.

Not all phones support all features

Although most Android devices are supported by Phone Hub, some features are limited to select the devices.

In particular, streaming applications on your Chromebook are limited to the following devices: Pixel 4A or subsequent version (executing Android 13 or subsequent version), nothing phone (1) and (2), and the Xiaomi 12T, 12T Pro, 13T and 13T Pro (also executed Android 13 or later).

Unfortunately, unless you have one of these devices, you will not be able to broadcast applications on your Android phone to your Chromebook. Hopefully Google opens this feature to more devices in the future.

However, if you want to deepen a little more in your Android system, you can simply use BAD to reflect the screen of any Android phone on your Chromebook wirelessly. It takes a little more know-how of the command line, because it was not based on the phone hub to work, but it opens the door to reflect the screen of any phone and bypass Google’s limits here.

How to associate your Android phone with your Chromebook

To combine your Android device with your Chromebook, you will want to start by making sure that your phone and Chromebook are on the same Wi-Fi network and that they are connected to the same main Google account.

Then you will head to Settings> Connected devices> Android phone. From this screen, you will want to click on “Configure”.

After clicking on the “Configure” button, a contextual window will appear which show which device you log in. Check the name and model of the device to ensure which of your phones (if you have several) to which you connect. This screen will also show you which functions you will have access via Phone Hub with your paired device.

Now click Connect, then enter your phone’s PIN code.

Once you have finished the configuration of things, simply click on “finished” in the lower right corner, and you will be twinned!

Now that you have your Chromebook and your Android phone with Phone Hub, you can use all the features available on a simple Bluetooth connection!

However, your Chromebook is not the only device that your Android phone can associate. Android and Windows 11 phones combine quite well, and the process is similar to the connection of your phone and your Chromebook.

By associating your Android phone on your Windows 11 computer, you will receive notifications, messages, photos copy, calls and multimedia checks.

However, you can associate your Android phone on your Windows computer, including using services like SCRPY to reflect your phone screen on your computer (which works with all modern Android devices).

In addition, Windows 11 supports an instantaneous connection function similar to Chromebook if you configure it, which makes your phone and your computer even more useful.