Microsoft is starting to test updates to its Your Phone app for Windows 10 this week, allowing Android users to mirror a phone screen directly to a PC. The “phone screen” feature will be available for Windows Insiders this week, and it requires the latest test builds of Windows 10 and the Your Phone app. Microsoft previously demonstrated the phone screen mirroring feature in Your Phone at the company’s Surface event in October. The app works by mirroring a phone screen straight onto Windows 10, and it provides a list of your Android apps. You can tap to access them and have them appear in the remote session of your phone that’s mirrored to your PC.
My 2018 Dell XPS 13 came with a Dell application that offered the same kind of functionality, and other than 5 minutes of messing around with it, I’ve never used it. I’m quite curious who this functionality is for, and if anyone will use it beyond the mere curiosity that is seems to be.
I’d say Windows has more pressing issues to address.
There are also all kinds of other applications that can do this, either using an ADB connection over USB or with some special app on the phone.
The only mainstream uses for this type of thing are texting ‘from’ your computer (and there are better options for that), and playing mobile games on a big screen (which can actually be rather nice if you have a big touchscreen on your computer).
There are a _lot_ of niche uses for this however, though most of them require their own direct integrations. For example, the developer tools in Chrome will let you connect a phone with an ADB debugging connection and use the developer tools on Chrome tabs you have open on the phone, which is insanely useful for mobile web development because mobile browsers seem to think that a JavaScript console has no use on a phone.