Microsoft has released updates for the Microsoft Apps app on Android and the Windows 10 Your Phone app to add initial SMS messaging support to Your Phone for Windows 10 users.
I have tested this on Windows 10 Version 1803 (Release Preview Ring), Windows 10 Redstone 5 Fast Ring and Windows 10 19H1 Skip Ahead builds and the new update works across all three systems.
Your Phone has been available since early August after it was announced and demoed at Build 2018 this past May. It was briefly made available to Windows 10 Version 1803, aka the April 2018 Update, three weeks ago but was pulled after a couple of days. According to the Your Phone team, they got a little ahead of themselves at that point.
With this update it appears they are ready to deliver Your Phones capabilities across the entire spectrum of Windows 10 in its various stages of release and testing builds.
My quick hands on this morning gave me a couple of insights:
- Setup only has to be completed to connect the app to your Android phone on one device. After that the SMS messaging capabilities were available across all of my devices.
- Three permissions are required on your Android device for the Microsoft Apps app so that Your Phone can access your SMS Messages, Contacts and Phone calling services.
- Currently there is no ability to manage your SMS messaging history such as deleting messages. You can highlight text from messages and copy that to your desktop clipboard to paste into other areas of the OS.
- I tested incoming SMS’s to see if they popped up a notification in the Action Center but it did not work. I am not sure if that part of the service has been turned on yet as this is the first public release of the capability in the app.
- You can not currently send MMS messages via Your Phone.
- Message notifications work in the Action Center on Windows 10 but they are not interactive and the Your Phone app has to be running for them to push a notification.
As I mentioned, this is an initial release of these capabilities so it is very early stages of testing. It will be interesting to see how much they expand the overall capabilities of both messaging and image handling between the app and your mobile device.
Thanks to Simon Bisson on Twitter for the heads up on the update to Your Phone.
Your Phone SMS Messaging Support Screenshot Gallery
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