Microsoft is removing one of the best features of Phone Link
One of Microsoft’s unexpected successes on PC is Phone Link, the way you can monitor and use your Android phone while working on your PC. So it’s a shame that Microsoft is fracturing the app when it’s probably not necessary.
Microsoft removes the Photos portion of Phone Link and returns it to File Explorer. Is this a big problem? Yes and no.
Windows Central and Windows Latest noticed the change Friday morning, but it also appeared on my Phone Link app: a notification that Phone Link is disappearing and you can now access your phone’s photos through the standard File Explorer app.
Phone Link, formerly called the Your Phone app on a Windows PC, is now a consistent experience within Windows for Android phones and Apple iPhones (well, sort of.) A recent change to the Windows Start menu places a “phone companion” menu on the page, which is essentially a subset and shortcut to Phone Link. Phone Link puts all your SMS messages, phone calls, photos and Android apps on one page and can even navigate the phone screen itself. Yes, mobile messaging has quietly migrated to iMessage and various Android apps like WhatsApp, but it’s still a unified view of what’s happening on your phone.
And it’s convenient, both for you and for Microsoft. I used Phone Link’s Photos feature when my phone wasn’t quite synced with OneDrive and the Windows Photos app, when I needed a photo from my phone to illustrate a story. I’ll still use Photos and even OneDrive to find photos from years ago, but being able to see key features of my phone right on the screen I’m working on is very convenient. And let’s face it: File Explorer is a little clunky at the best of times.
The one feature I don’t see in Phone Link that I see elsewhere on the PC is support for video, which is becoming more and more of a feature in our daily lives as people record short clips of what they see around them. For this, I suppose it’s worth visiting File Explorer or the Windows Photos app, which remains my choice for archived photos and videos.
However, it (still) feels like Microsoft is making changes that no one asked for. Isn’t there a better way?
