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Windows 10 Your Phone Apps feature rolls out to Samsung phones

By Ewdison Then/

When Samsung announced the Galaxy Note 20 last month, it revealed a new feature that is one of the fruits of its closer partnership with Microsoft. Your Phone, which is Microsoft's bridge to the Android world, would allow individual Android apps to be launched in their own windows. That period of exclusivity to the Galaxy Note 20 is over and the Apps feature is now rolling out to more Android phones, as long as those phones were made by Samsung.

The poorly-named Your Phone app for Windows 10 now actually supports three ways of using your Android phone from your Window PC. The basic Link to Windows lets you drag and drop files between the computer and your phone while Phone screen lets you mirror your Android's screen and do anything from there.

What the new Apps feature offers is a way to seamlessly run Android apps from your phone and have them behave like a Windows app, in its own window and taskbar entry. You can even pin apps on the taskbar. The one limitation, which Microsoft promises will soon be fixed, is that you can only run one app at a time.

Microsoft is now announcing that this Apps feature is rolling out more widely to Android phones but comments are calling it out for the slightly misleading announcement. The truth is that all these fancy Your Phone features only support Samsung's Galaxy phones and nothing else (with the exception of the Microsoft's Surface Duo).

For owners of Samsung's phones, which is admittedly a large chunk of the global mobile market, these features definitely come as perks to sticking to the brand. Samsung, however, isn't the only Android phone maker out there and Microsoft hasn't yet committed in public whether it will bring those same experiences to other brands in the future.

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