SEATTLE—For the second year running, Microsoft is ramping up tie-ins between iOS and Android mobile devices and Windows 10.
At its annual Build developer conference here, the software giant's corporate vice president for Windows, Joe Belfiore, announced that a key feature in the latest Windows 10 April 2018 Update, the Timeline, will interact with smartphones running Android and iOS.
But an even more dramatic development will be the ability to actually see content that lives in your phone right on a desktop window on the PC.
This "Your Phone" experience, according to Belfiore, will let you do things like view and drag photos from the phone window on the computer to another folder, and to view text messages and notifications. Microsoft presented the feature as part of its new Microsoft 365 offering, which combines Office, Windows, and other services for businesses, enterprises, and educational institutions.
Access to Timeline—which lets you "go back in time" to past activities—on phones will happen in the Edge browser app on iOS and Android, as well as on the Microsoft Launcher for Android. The latter will get the ability to run line-of-business apps via Microsoft Intune. The Edge app on both platforms already lets you continue browsing from the smartphone to the PC.
The Your Phone feature, as with many of these types of integration, is likely to be deeper on Android than iOS, not only because of the Launcher capability, but because Apple keeps tighter reins on its mobile ecosystem. The ability to easily move between smartphone and PC is a welcome development from Microsoft, in any case, since the Windows operating system still powers the overwhelming majority of desktops—over 88 percent, according to the latest NetMarketShare numbers.