Windows Your Phone Apps Feature: What You Need To Know
When Samsung debuted the Galaxy Note 20 and Galaxy Note 20 Ultra earlier this month, it tried to appeal to a more work-oriented crowd, positioning the phablet's productivity features and its tie-in with Microsoft's software. Of course, those features could hardly stay exclusive to the phones for long, especially as far as Microsoft is concerned. The company has now announced the wider availability of its new Apps experience for the Your Phone Windows app and here's what you have to keep in mind before getting too excited.
The similarly poorly-named Apps Feature basically allows Android users to launch an Android app on Windows in a separate window as if they were a native Windows app. This builds upon the Phone Screen mirroring feature but only shows a single app rather than, well, mirroring your phone. Users will also be able to pin such apps to the Windows taskbar, again like a regular Windows app.
The requirements for this special Your Phone feature, however, remains the same. You need to have the latest Link to Windows app installed on your phone and the latest version of the Your Phone app on Windows 10. More importantly, however, this feature is compatible with only a select number of Samsung Galaxy phones going back to 2018. Other Android phones, including Google's own Pixel, are still uninvited.
There are also a few caveats to how this Your Phone Apps feature works. For one, you can only run one app at a time, though Samsung hints that the Galaxy Note 20 will have an exclusive multi-app support in the near future. The Android apps also still behave like Android apps even when running in Windows, which means actions like a right-click will be mapped to Android's "back" gesture. You'll have to click and hold to do the equivalent tap and hold on Android.
The Your Phone Apps experience is slowly rolling out to Windows users so don't get too stressed if it isn't there yet. It's definitely a convenient feature that all Android users across different OEMs would probably love to have. Whether those get supported soon if at all, however, is still unknown at this point.