Phone Link features & real limits — what I found testing it

Sensitive messages like OTP / verification codes are now censored (hidden) in Phone Link rather than shown in plain text on your PC. A welcome privacy improvement if you use Phone Link on a shared screen.

When a call comes in from an unknown number, you can now save the contact from your PC, and it syncs to your phone's contact book. The catch: you can't pick the deeper options (such as which account/email to save it to) — it's a basic save only.

What you'll notice: messages that look fine on the phone — sharp photos, read receipts, typing indicators — arrive on the PC looking like it's 2010. Compressed images, no receipts, no "typing…". Nothing is broken; you've dropped off RCS onto plain SMS/MMS.

Microsoft says: RCS works in Phone Link when your phone's default messaging app is Samsung Messages. That's the entire condition, and it sits in a support table almost nobody reads.

What that means in practice: if your default is Google Messages — the norm on Pixel and most non-Samsung Android, and a common switch on Samsung too — Phone Link falls back to SMS/MMS. The fix isn't hiding in Phone Link's settings: your default messaging app decides what Phone Link can carry. Worth knowing before you spend an evening hunting for an RCS toggle that was never there.

And in the US, that condition has now collided with reality. Samsung's own end-of-service notice retired Samsung Messages in the United States on 6 July 2026 for Galaxy devices on Android 12 or newer, steering everyone to Google Messages; the app can no longer send ordinary messages there, and it's gone from the Galaxy Store. Outside the US it continues for now. So for a US Galaxy owner, the single documented route to RCS inside Phone Link has been switched off by Samsung — not by Microsoft — and Microsoft's support wording hasn't caught up. I'm re-testing what Phone Link actually carries on a US Galaxy running Google Messages and will publish the result here rather than guess; if you're outside the US, the condition above still applies.

Two limits worth setting expectations on. Phone Link shows recent message history rather than everything stored on the phone — reporting puts the window at roughly the last 30 days — so it's a live view, not an archive, and it isn't the place to go digging for a conversation from last spring. And it's read-and-reply only: you can't delete or otherwise manage messages held on the phone from the PC, so tidying up has to be done in the phone's own messaging app.

The old Photos tab is being retired and folded into Windows File Explorer. That tab showed your most recent 2,000 photos and videos (up from just 25 when Phone Link first launched) — and that whole view is going away during 2026. In its place, your phone shows up directly in File Explorer, which is actually more capable.

What people expect: the Photos view shows everything on the phone.

What it actually shows: only your Camera Roll and Screenshots folders — and only the most recent 2,000 items from them. Anything saved elsewhere is invisible: WhatsApp images, downloads, screenshots an app filed into its own folder, photos you tidied into albums outside Camera Roll. They aren't missing and syncing isn't broken — Phone Link was never looking there. Move a file into Camera Roll and it appears. This is also why File Explorer is the better route: it sees the whole phone.

Two different paths, two different limits. Through File Explorer, your phone behaves like a USB drive — there's no practical per-file cap, which is how I pulled a 2.08 GB video from phone to PC in roughly five minutes. The drag-and-drop transfer path (dragging files onto Phone Link, or "send to PC") is where the hard cap lives: 100 files per batch and 512 MB per file (about 51.2 GB in theory — please don't). One honest caveat on that 2.08 GB figure: it's best case — my PC is a Lenovo Legion 5 gaming laptop and my phone a Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7, both flagships on the same fast network — so treat it as the ceiling, not what a mid-range setup will hit. All of this is Android; iPhone transfers work completely differently and are far more limited in practice (iPhone vs Android: file transfer →).

"Using your phone's apps on your PC" isn't a breakthrough — it's screen mirroring under a different name. The giveaway: opening an app and mirroring the whole screen throw the same permission prompt — "Start recording or casting with Link to Windows?" — because both are recording the phone's display.

Mirrored apps used to be stuck in a narrow phone-shaped window. Since January 2026 you'll get a nudge offering Expanded screen, which stretches the app across your desktop — it works by telling the phone to relaunch that app in a wider layout, then streaming the bigger version back. Two honest caveats: it's almost full screen, leaving roughly 10% of the display unused, and it depends entirely on the app. Ones built for tablets look great. Others refuse the wider layout, and some — WhatsApp is the usual offender — come through blurry. A few need restarting before the layout switches.

What happens: you mirror your phone, open your banking app or a streaming service, and the window goes black — audio may keep playing, but the picture is gone. It feels like a Phone Link bug, and people reinstall everything chasing it.

What's actually happening: it's working exactly as designed — just not yours. Apps with hardware DRM or banking-grade screen protection deliberately refuse to be recorded, and mirroring is screen recording. The app is blocking the capture, so Windows gets a black frame. There's no fix and there shouldn't be: the same protection stops malware filming your banking session. Use those apps on the phone directly.

Microsoft says: the "Apps" experience is available on select Samsung, HONOR, OPPO, ASUS, vivo and Xiaomi devices, in select markets, running Android 10 or later, that have Link to Windows pre-installed. Everyone else installs it from the Play Store.

What I found: that "pre-installed" clause is the whole ballgame, and almost nobody spells it out. The preinstalled build is wired into the phone's system — you'll find it in Quick Settings when you swipe down, not as an app icon — and it carries the mirroring hooks. The Play Store build looks identical and pairs perfectly, but those hooks simply aren't in it. On my Galaxy Z Fold 7 the Apps section is there. On my Pixel 10 Pro XL and Motorola Razr Ultra, same PC and same Wi-Fi, it never appears — and no amount of re-pairing, resetting, or updating changes that.

On phones with the preinstalled build, the phone's own screen goes blank while you mirror — a privacy feature, so nobody standing near your desk reads along. Swipe the phone or press the side button and it wakes normally. It's toggleable from the PC in Phone Link's settings. This started as Samsung-only and later rolled out more widely, which is why older guides still describe it as a Galaxy quirk.

Multi-app streaming isn't a two-app parlour trick: I've run it across three of my devices and had seven apps open at one go, each in its own window, still smooth and all of them working. The part that confuses people is audio — a mirrored app's sound plays on the phone by default, and there are two ways to move it to the PC. One is the "Hear audio from" setting under Phone Link → Settings → Features → Apps. The other appears whenever your phone is playing something: on Phone Link's home pane, next to the media controls, a small phone-with-speaker icon offers "we need permission for Bluetooth to play audio on this PC" and walks you through a Bluetooth pairing, confirming a PIN on both devices. Here's the catch I hit: the phone's confirmation prompt vanishes after about 30 seconds, while the PC's keeps showing — uselessly, since pairing needs a yes on both. React fast, or restart the flow. Once paired, the icon flips to a computer-with-speaker and sound follows to the PC — audio only: play a video on the phone and you'll hear it on the PC without seeing it.

How to turn it on: open the Start menu, search "Camera", and open the Windows Camera app. Top-right, you'll see a small camera-swap icon — click it to switch to your phone's camera. On the phone side there's no new permission prompt; it just needs to be unlocked, and the feed starts. On the phone you get two controls: switch camera (front/back) and pause. You can take photos and record video from the PC.

The catch: the feed is locked to low quality, nowhere near what the phone can do. Photos come out at about 0.9 MB, 16:9, 1280×720; video is 720p, 16:9, 30 fps. For reference, my Galaxy Z Fold 7 shoots 8K at 30 fps, 4K at 120 fps, and 4K motion photos natively — so as a webcam it's a big step down. Fine for a video call in a pinch; not a replacement for a real camera.

The app's instant hotspot was about 10% slower than connecting to the same phone hotspot manually through Windows settings — likely because Phone Link adds its own overhead. For maximum speed, the manual hotspot still wins.

Running Phone Link / Link to Windows reduced my phone's total on-battery hours by about 15%. I tested across a Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 and a Pixel 10 Pro XL; your result will vary by device and how heavily you use mirroring and transfers, but expect a noticeable hit — worth knowing before you leave it running all day.

Lock PC works, but it's one-way. You can lock your PC from your phone — but you can't unlock it from the phone. You'll have to unlock at the computer itself. It's one of several PC controls the phone app picked up recently — the rest are here.

Resume lets you pick up something you were doing on your phone directly from the Windows taskbar — the PC offers to continue it. It's the closest Windows gets to Apple's Handoff, but the honest scope is much narrower than that comparison suggests: Microsoft's support page, dated January 2026, lists only Spotify, vivo Browser and WhatsApp as supported Resume experiences. Handoff works because Apple built it into the OS; Resume works only where an app developer implemented it, so opening a Word or Excel file on Android does not reliably produce a taskbar handoff. You'll find the switch under Settings → Apps → Resume. It used to work only through Link to Windows; in January 2026 Microsoft added a second path (via the Windows Notification System), so more apps can offer it. It depends on the app's developer building support in, which is why it appears for some things and not others.

If you've found a guide about using your phone through Copilot, it's out of date. Copilot on the PC used to connect to your Android — reading messages and contacts, sending texts, setting alarms and timers, starting navigation on Samsung devices — all riding on Link to Windows. Microsoft retired the feature at the end of May 2026. It isn't broken and there's no setting to restore it; it's simply gone. This is the second Copilot-era phone feature to be withdrawn alongside the Photos tab, which is worth remembering when you read older tutorials.

Phone Link can't relay call audio to a Bluetooth headset connected to your PC. Calls route through the PC's own speakers and microphone — or a wired USB headset — and if you're expecting your usual wireless earbuds to pick up a Phone Link call, that's the reason they don't. Worth testing before a call that matters. To be clear, this is about the second Bluetooth hop: calls still reach the PC over the phone-to-PC Bluetooth link perfectly well — it's passing that audio onward to wireless earbuds that isn't supported.

The old story: Link to Windows on your phone could connect or disconnect a PC. That was the whole app. Everything else happened on the Windows side.

What I found: from version 1.25102.140.0 onward it's a genuine control surface for your PC. From the phone you can now:

• Send files to the PC — a proper "Send files" button on the phone, rather than only pulling from Windows.
• See your PC's battery and network strength — the battery figure refreshes roughly once a minute. Handy for knowing whether the laptop you left in the other room is about to die.
• Sync the clipboard, with history. Anything you copy on the PC lands on the phone's clipboard automatically — no need to open the app. Link to Windows keeps a history you can delete items from, or push straight into WhatsApp, Telegram or anything else. Setup and quirks: cross-device copy & paste.
• Start mirroring from the phone — a Mirror to PC / Cast to PC toggle. Same mirroring as before, but you no longer have to go to the PC's Apps section to begin it. (It's the same feature underneath, so it still needs a phone with Link to Windows preinstalled.)
• Recent Activity — a feed of what's moved between the devices: files you sent, anything you right-clicked "Send to my phone" on the PC, and synced clipboard items.

What it still can't do: change your PC's volume, toggle its Bluetooth, or flip night light. Combined with Lock PC, the phone has quietly become the second remote control in this relationship.

Turn a feature off and Phone Link leaves a sticky banner on its screen nudging you to turn it back on (telling you what you're "missing"), and the same nags appear as continuous notifications on your phone. I found no way to dismiss them permanently short of turning the feature back on.

On iPhone you can't browse your photos from the PC the way you can on Android — file sharing only sends files; there's no cross-device browsing of the iPhone. Also, the Phone Link dashboard's left pane shows your iPhone's battery only — no wallpaper or phone image like Android gets.

One PC, both phones. You can link an Android and an iPhone to the same PC and switch between them anytime in Phone Link → Settings → Devices — pick the device you want and use it seamlessly. One catch worth knowing before you try: adding the second phone can hit a snag where the other platform's button won't open at all — what I found, and the restart that clears it →

Skipped a prompt by accident — background access, say? You don't have to start over. Turn it back on manually in the app's permissions: Link to Windows → app info → Permissions on the phone, or Windows Settings → Apps → Phone Link on the PC. And if that feels fiddly, just close both apps and reopen them — about 4 times out of 5 it simply asks again or re-triggers the permission.

Android 15 and newer can classify one-time passcodes and 2FA alerts as protected content: Phone Link shows a placeholder instead of the code, by OS policy rather than a lapsed permission — the code has to be read on the phone. Separately, Android 13 and newer require notification access to be explicitly approved, which is a different rule producing different symptoms. And anything inside Samsung Secure Folder — notifications and files alike — never surfaces in Phone Link at all, so testing with a banking or authenticator app kept in there will make the relay look broken when it's working exactly as designed.