Your Phone app adds contact pictures, badge toggle, and more for Insiders

By Dan Thorp-Lancaster
published

Making the jump from your phone to PC more seamless.

Microsoft this week is continuing its steady march of new features for the Your Phone app on PC. A handful of features now rolling out for Insiders includes the ability to see contact pictures brought over from your Android phone, a toggle for the notification badge, and inline replies for notifications.

The new features were revealed by Analy Otero Diaz, a senior program manager on Microsoft's Windows app team, on Twitter (via MSPU). Perhaps the most noteworthy change is the addition of contact pictures. If available, Your Phone will now pull in contact pictures you have set on your phone for things like message threads.

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Additionally, Diaz revealed a new settings toggle to turn notification badges on and off for the Your Phone icon on your taskbar. And now, when you receive a notification for a text message, you'll be able to reply directly from that notification.

Finally, Microsoft has added another option to the right-click menu when viewing pictures from your phone on your PC. You'll now be able to directly save an image to your computer, alongside the "Copy" and "Share" functions.

The Your Phone app has come a long way from its start, adding things for Insiders to test, such as notification syncing and phone screen mirroring in recent months. Insiders should be able to start testing this week's features now with the latest version of Your Phone on PC.

See at Microsoft (opens in new tab)

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Dan Thorp-Lancaster
Dan Thorp-Lancaster

Dan Thorp-Lancaster is the former Editor-in-Chief of Windows Central. He began working with Windows Central, Android Central, and iMore as a news writer in 2014 and is obsessed with tech of all sorts. You can follow Dan on Twitter @DthorpL and Instagram @heyitsdtl. 

11 Comments
  • Do you still have to be on the same WiFi network or will it connect via Bluetooth?
  • Still the same WiFi network.
  • I think I read it will have Bluetooth eventually
  • I couldn't get it working. Not wasting anymore of my time.
  • The insider version or the one that's available for the public? I use the public (beta/preview?) one, sometimes it's a little slow but it works for me. I'm excited for it to further evolve and get better.
  • Tried it. But at first it wouldn't stay connected, and then when I disconnected it manually, it kept reconnecting! *sigh* That and the UI is pretty clunky, and it kept splitting up my sms messages (when nothing else used did). Might be worth a try again down the line, but it's got a long way to go.
  • This app has come a long way
  • The app doesn't work great in work environments, because phones are usually on a different network from your work computer. I really hope they figure out a way to make it work without requiring both to be on the same network.
  • They want to fix the rampant connectivity problems first and worry about the nicities later. I've wasted far too much time trying to make this work. Don't keep building on buggy foundations.
  • Nothing beats Dell Connect!
  • I understand that some people may have privacy concerns, but they seriously should have an option to sync through the cloud. As it is right now, it reminds me of the old active sync for pda's.