Ask HN: How do you switch between your phone and your PC? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you switch between your phone and your PC?

My digital life revolves around my Android phone and Windows 11 laptop (and then Linux servers, but this is irrelevant to my question).

My main problem is that when I start something on the phone (usually a web page) I do not have an easy way to continue on the laptop. I end up sending myself emails or "pushing" the web page on the laptop (using the "share" function or Pushbullet - either works from time to time).

The other way around is even more complicated.

How do you manage that?

Do you use an app to take over the phone on your laptop? I tried in the past to join my phone with Windows but the experience was very bad (the phone had to be constantly unlocked, some apps were not working, ...)

Or do you have a set of micro-services that each do their thing? (sharing a file, sharing a URL, ...)

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In terms of browser usage, that's a rare use-casen for me: There's very little overlap between the kinds of things I want to open and engage with on the phone versus the kinds of things I want to do on my desktop. If there were, I'd probably use Firefox synced tabs, but I haven't bothered to set that up.

For some rare exceptions, I've saved a link as a Slack note-to-self. Another simple option might be a Google Doc.

For email, I use an IMAP account, so all of the current and important stuff is not (just) on either client.

It sadly doesn’t help you, but inside the Apple ecosystem that feature is builtin and called Continuity/Handoff:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/102426

Most of the time I'm using that from the Cmd-Tab-Switcher. There’s also a shared clipboard. Both are rather fast.

In an ideal world that would be a standard, although there are obvious problems around identity, security, and app frameworks.

Could a web browser with bookmark sync maybe work? I don't know how fast Chrome/Firefox are in that regard. But bookmarking to a simple tmp folder would be the first thought.

Other weird idea for the Windows-to-phone use case: A browser extension which generates a visible QR code for the current page, then use the phone's camera app to open that. Trains your arm and isn’t dependent on the network.

W11 is supposed to have a built-in capability to sync with Android now, using Link To Windows (LTW).

But very few Android phones have LTW built-in yet.

I think the mainstream way from Microsoft is to install or upgrade LTW on your Android phone if you haven't done it already:

>https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.microsoft....

And this is some of what you're supposed to be able to do with it:

>https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/seamlessly-transfe...

Good luck !

I use a Mac with an Android phone.

For texting, I use Google Messages for Web.

For browser tabs and history, Chrome syncs them automatically if you're logged in. You can easily reopen tabs on the other device. Not form data though.

For actual user input (forms, etc.) usually the cloud web apps (Gmail, etc.) save your progress to your account anyway. Coding work is synced by git push and git pull.

Logins and 2fa are all synced by 1Password. Photos and documents and files by Google.

There's not much else I need to share between the two.

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