Phone Hub will soon let you stream your messaging apps (and more) to your Chromebook

Multi-device clipboard and screen casting, oh my!

Google I/O 2022 is full of feature announcements promising tighter integration between Android phones and tablets, Chromebooks and Wear OS watches, to name a few. While it takes a while to achieve connectivity as seamless as Apple’s ecosystem, the little improvements add up. Besides Matter for the Google Home ecosystem and screen casting for Chromebooks and cars, Google is supercharging Phone Hub on Chromebooks for a better messaging experience.

If you use Google Messages on your Android phone, Phone Hub allows you to access and send text messages from your Chromebook, either through direct interaction with a new message notification or through Messages PWA pre-installed on most Chromebooks. However, with Android 13 arriving this fall, Google says it will expand the program’s capabilities to more platforms, letting you manage conversations from different messaging apps. Unlike the current experience, this will not require a PWA. Instead, it will work by casting those apps from your phone directly to your Chromebook.

But that’s not all that’s new in Phone Hub. Shortly after the UI arrived last year, we also tracked a possible increase that would allow users to see their phone screen directly on their Chromebooks. Google said it was working on the casting feature during CES 2022. Its functionality was finally demonstrated and it opened up the prospect of casting apps to Windows and Mac computers. An I/O announcement on Google’s corporate blog suggests the new Phone Hub experience might be closer than ever. Android 13 will also see the company improve connectivity between Android phones and tablets, allowing you to copy and paste URLs and photos between them.

As the number of smart gadgets we use increases, Google says it will continue to work with its partners to make cross-device connectivity as seamless as possible.

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