The Phone Linking Feature In Windows 10 Is Broken For Many Users

Microsoft’s Fall Creators Update for Windows 10 brings lots of new features and improvements to the OS.

One of its novelties is the ability to link your phone and your Windows 10 PC to send data to pick up where you left off. For instance, you can send websites from your phone to your PC to continue browsing.

Setting up the feature

Open the Settings app via the shortcut Windows-I and go to Phone when the window opens. Select “add a phone” option.
Select the country and type the phone number.
Hit the send button.

So far, everything should work fine. Microsoft will then send an SMS to your mobile device for verification purposes, the point at which things go crazy.

Some users get an SMS saying that “Cortana is ready to install and link to your PC.” If you click on that link, the Microsoft Cortana app opens on Google Play. In some cases, users got a link to the Microsoft Arrow Launcher because Cortana is not available in their country.

The interesting thing is that the apps are not required for the “send to PC” functionality. The app that can be installed is the Microsoft Apps.

Microsoft Launcher and Microsoft Cortana – Digital Assistant add the same capabilities. Besides this, they also add a new functionality to the device that you may not need/require.

Microsoft Apps adds the “Send to PC” option

The installation of Microsoft Apps adds “Send to PC” option to the phone’s share feature. You will be asked to sign in to a Microsoft Account the first time you want to use this feature. The feature works pretty well, and the website is launched if your PC is online.

There’s also a downside to all this, though: this will happen even if this is not your default browser on your Windows 10 system.

It’s pretty weird that Microsoft keeps pushing apps to devices if they set up the “Send to PC” feature on their Windows 10 systems. Microsoft offering Cortana despite it not being available in some countries should be addressed because this confuses users.

Setting up the feature#

Microsoft Apps adds the “Send to PC” option#

Setting up the feature

Microsoft Apps adds the “Send to PC” option