Skip to main content

Microsoft just made Teams even more of a hassle to use

A Home screen in Microsoft Teams showing the different Communities to choose from.
microsoft

In a Microsoft support article, the software giant says that starting in April 2025, Microsoft Teams will no longer support sending or receiving SMS from Android devices. This change pushes users to switch to the Phone Link app for SMS messaging.

If you attempt to send an SMS using Teams, you’ll be greeted with an alert notifying you of the change. The SMS feature is one of the lesser-known features, and you may not have even known it existed, but Microsoft will soon remove it from Teams. For now, you can still view SMS messages under Recent and send texts, but this feature will soon be removed. Currently, the “Link your phone” feature lets you manage your text messages without having to switch to another app, thus making you go through fewer steps.

Recommended Videos

With Skype shutting down soon, some users may turn to Teams as an alternative, meaning that Teams might be getting a bigger audience. But now, new users will be greeted with the need to use the Phone Link app to do something they could once do on Teams. You can use the feature on a Windows 11 PC and any Android device with version 7.0 or above. You will also need the Link to Windows app, but if your Android device has version 9.0 or later, it should be preinstalled.

It’s not that bad since the Phone Link app is helpful. You can view your phone battery level, your pictures, and more. Using another app may seem inconvenient, but switching to Phone Link could be beneficial.

Judy Sanhz
Judy Sanhz is a Digital Trends computing writer covering all computing news. Loves all operating systems and devices.
Microsoft may have found a sneaky way to make you use Bing
The new Bing preview screen appears on a Surface Laptop Studio.

Microsoft is trying out a pretty unusual strategy to stop Bing users from switching to Google when they need to search for something. As spotted by Reddit users, and reported on by Windows Latest, if you type "Google" into Bing right now, you'll be taken to a results page with a special header that happens to look similar to the Google search bar.

The page even loads with Bing's top search bar hidden -- you need to scroll up to make it appear. Since what you're looking at is actually Bing, it doesn't say "Google" above the centered search bar. Still, the style of the search bar and the illustration is similar to what you might often find in Google.

Read more
Google one-ups Microsoft by making chats easier to transfer
Google Spaces in Google Chat on a MacBook.

In a recent blog post, Google announced that it is making it easier for admins to migrate from Microsoft Teams to Google Chat to reduce downtime. Admins can easily do this within the Google Chat migration menu and connect to opposing Microsoft accounts to transfer Teams data.

Google gave step-by-step instructions for admins on how to transfer the messages. Admins need to connect to their Microsoft account and upload a CSV of the Teams from where they transfer the messages. From there, it requires just entering a starting date for messages to be migrated from Teams and clicking Star migration. Once it's complete, it'll make the migrated space, messages, and conversation data available to Google Workspace users.

Read more
Microsoft Outlook and Teams are down — and might be for a while
Microsoft Outlook app landing page.

As reported by Deadline, over 5,000 people have reported issues with different Microsoft 365 apps since around 8 a.m. ET this morning. The outage is affecting worldwide usage of email and calendar services associated with Exchange, Outlook, and Teams.

https://twitter.com/MSFT365Status/status/1860973220662280356

Read more