Microsoft stops breaking Windows 11 – instead it just made Phone Link even better with Android apps
- Phone Link is getting a new feature for when you’re streaming Android apps to the desktop (with certain phones)
- Currently a lot of apps are stuck in a narrow phone-screen (portrait) view
- The new ‘expanded view’ button currently in testing will allow the app’s window to be much larger
If you use Phone Link to hook up your smartphone to Windows 11, and sometimes run Android apps on your desktop, you could soon have a way to get those apps to appear in a larger window.
As Windows Latest points out, Microsoft is now testing a new option for the Phone Link’s app streaming feature (a capability for certain smartphones that lets you run Android apps in their own window on the Windows 11 desktop).
This is an ‘expanded view’ icon, which lives in the top-right of the window that the Android app’s running in (next to minimize), and when clicked, it makes the window much bigger – taking it out of the small (portrait) view that you’re stuck with when using many apps now.
That narrow phone-screen view is far from ideal on a bigger desktop monitor, and it’s great to be able to have an expanded view – even if it isn’t quite full-screen (as you can see in the example screenshot below).
This feature also appears to be somewhat wonky with some apps currently, such as Uber, where the app only gets slightly bigger, and there are large slabs of black background to the left and right of the usable section of the window. Text can also be slightly blurry, which again isn’t ideal.
However, remember that this feature is still in testing, so we can expect there to be problems. (Windows Latest notes it was trying out the feature on a Windows 11 preview build in the Dev channel, with version 1.25112.33.0 of the Phone Link app).
Analysis: mirroring workaround
As Windows Latest observes, there are fudges you can currently use to get an Android app which is locked to a portrait phone screen size to transform into a bigger window on the desktop. Namely by using screen mirroring (the ‘open phone screen’ option) with Phone Link and rotating the phone display to landscape.
However, it’ll be great to be able to use app streaming and have a simple button which can increase the size of a small Android app window with a single click.
While as noted, there appear to be quite a few wrinkles with the current implementation of this feature, those should be ironed out before this expand button is unleashed with the release version of Phone Link.
The catch is that app streaming is only supported with certain smartphones, including recent Samsung models, and also Asus ROG, Honor, OnePlus, Oppo, and Xiaomi handsets. (Although note that basic phone mirroring, which is a separate capability to app streaming, is more widely supported).
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