Skip to main content

Cortana for Android syncs notifications, lets you leave your phone in your pocket

windows 10 free update promotion file removal dark
Image used with permission by copyright holder
At Microsoft’s Build conference this year, the Redmond-based company announced new “cloud notification” integration that’ll see Android phones gain the ability to mirror incoming messages, calls, and texts to a paired Windows 10 PC’s tray. It didn’t take long for the feature to appear in an updated Cortana app for Android and a beta build of Windows 10 in early April, but it appeared unfinished; only battery and missed call notifications could be enabled. A new version of the Android Cortana client released on Thursday, though, is significantly more robust.

Most notably, the latest Cortana app for Android adds several toggles to the “Sync notifications” tab within its Settings menu. In addition to familiar options for mirroring notifications about your phone’s battery level and incoming phone calls, it’s gained a setting to mirror notifications to a Windows 10 PC on a per-app basis. Enabling the new setting requires a few steps, including updating your PC to Windows 10 Insider build 14342 or newer, associating your handset with the Microsoft you use to sign into your PC, granting the Cortana app access to your phone’s notifications, and enabling notification syncing on PC. But once the prerequisites are met, getting phone notifications through your PC’s a seamless, hands-off affair: they appear in your notification drawer as a native app would.

Recommended Videos

Notifications come in relatively quickly — in a manner of seconds, on average — and convey the gist of your Android phone’s messages, but they aren’t perfect. None of the notifications are actionable, which is to say you can’t reply to e-mails or dismiss bothersome Facebook app pop-ups from your computer — those sorts of tasks have to be performed on your phone. And many apps, including Gmail and the organizational app Trello, mirror only bits and pieces of messages: Gmail, for example, indicates the number of unread e-mails in your Inbox (e.g., “3 new messages”) in mirrored Windows 10 notifications, but doesn’t provide a preview of those messages.

Please enable Javascript to view this content

It’s the early days, of course — Android notification integration’s not slated to hit stable builds of Windows 10 until this summer, likely to coincide with the firm’s Anniversary Update. But the feature’s nowhere near as robust as the sort of mirroring enabled by apps like Pushbullet and AirDroid, both of which allow you to dismiss notifications. Still, if native, if you’ve got an Android phone and native, free notification mirroring’s a must, Microsoft’s solution represents the cream of the crop.

Kyle Wiggers
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Kyle Wiggers is a writer, Web designer, and podcaster with an acute interest in all things tech. When not reviewing gadgets…
Windows 11 24H2 may crash your PC if you have a certain SSD
The blue screen of death in Windows.

Microsoft's Windows 11 2024 Update, more commonly referred to as 24H2, is here, but it's not without issues. Reports from disgruntled users have flooded various forums, talking about constant blue screens of death (BSOD) that have appeared since they updated to the latest version of Windows. Although Microsoft has yet to officially acknowledge the problem, the users seem to have pinpointed the cause of it, and even found a workaround.

So far, it looks like these crashes are fairly limited in scope, as they seem to happen if you have one of a few Western Digital SSD models. Other SSD vendors appear unaffected so far. As reported on the WD Community Forums, users are getting BSODs with the error "critical process has died" ever since they updated to the 24H2 update.

Read more
Android phones have started receiving crucial anti-theft features
Android Theft Detection on Pixel 9.

At Google I/O earlier this year, a trio of safety features were announced to keep Android devices safe in events like theft, locking the device, and setting up new guardrails so that the phone won’t accept a fresh setup in the hands of a bad actor.

Some of these changes were supposed to arrive in the same window as Android 15’s public release, which is right around the corner. But according to Mishaal Rahman and 9to5Google, they’ve already started appearing to users in the U.S. following a test in Brazil.

Read more
RCS messages are about to look a little different on your Android phone
Google Messages app on a Pixel 8 Pro, showing an RCS Chat message thread.

You might soon see a change in how your messages look on your Android phone. Google Messages is rolling out a change to how the type of message is displayed. At present, it says either "Text message" or "RCS message" at the bottom, but the new change will shorten these to either (Text) or (RCS).

9to5Google's Abner Li reports the change and points out that the phrasing could be reduced to either Text or RCS to streamline the appearance and make it look less technical. That said, only a limited number of people have reported the change so far. Google has a tendency to roll updates out slowly, however, so that's not surprising.

Read more