One of Microsoft’s unexpected success stories on the PC is Phone Link, the way in which 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 probably doesn’t need to.
Microsoft is removing the Photos portion of Phone Link and handing it back to File Explorer. Is this a big deal? Yes and no.
Windows Central and Windows Latest noticed the change Friday morning, but it has appeared on my Phone Link app, too: A notification that Phone Link is going away, and that you can now access your phone’s photos via the standard File Explorer application.
Phone Link, once called the Your Phone app on a Windows PC, is now a cohesive experience within Windows for both Android phones and Apple iPhones (well, kind of.) A recent change to the Windows Start menu places a “phone companion” menu on the page, which is basically a subset and a shortcut to Phone Link. Phone Link puts all of your SMS messages, phone calls, photos, and Android apps on a single page, and can even navigate through the phone screen itself. Yes, mobile messaging has quietly migrated to iMessage and various Android apps like WhatsApp, but it’s still a unified vision of what’s taking place on your phone.
And that’s handy, both for you and for Microsoft. I’ve used Phone Link’s Photos feature when my phone hasn’t quite synced with OneDrive and the Windows Photos app, when I need a photo from my phone to illustrate a story. I’ll still use Photos and even OneDrive to hunt down photos from years ago, but the fact that I can see the key features of my phone right on the display that I’m working on is quite handy. And let’s face it: File Explorer is a bit clunky in the best of times.
The one feature that I don’t see in Phone Link that I see elsewhere on the PC is support for video, which is becoming more of a feature in our daily lives as people record short snippets of what they see around them. For that, I suppose it’s worth visiting File Explorer or the Windows Photos app, which remains my choice for archived photos and video.
It does, however, feel (again) like Microsoft is making changes that no one asked for. Isn’t there a better way?