Microsoft has announced a new feature for its OS called Windows 10 App Mirroring. This new feature will be coming to all Windows 10 devices with the October update. It will allow users to control any mobile app from their desktop or laptop. This capability will come in the form of the new Your Phone app.
Microsoft’s Windows 10 App Mirroring feature is currently limited in scope but will expand its capabilities in the future. It can currently send and receive texts from Android SMS services. It will also allow instant photo sharing from devices running Google’s mobile OS. The Your Phone app will do this through the ability to simply copy and paste images from your device onto your Windows programs.
While Windows 10 App Mirroring can only use SMS and official photo apps, but Microsoft has demonstrated the feature working with Snapchat. This demonstration also revealed that games on the Android OS could be playable on Windows 10. This is because Super Mario Run was seen on the list of apps during the demo of the new feature. Playing Android games will be done through the Your Phone app casting your entire mobile screen onto your Windows desktop. To run this feature, however, you will need Android 7.0 or higher on your mobile device.
Currently, the only iOS-focused feature of Windows 10 App Mirroring is to transfer web pages from an iPhone to a Windows 10 desktop. There is currently no news whether more iOS apps will be able to be used on Microsoft’s laptop and desktop OS. The SMS functionality may not be arriving on Windows devices as Apple has its own similar service on Mac OS.
This new feature could be seen as a response to the demise of Microsoft’s own mobile device ambitions. The Windows Phone OS was originally launched in 2010, but it was discontinued in 2014. It’s successor, Windows 10 Mobile, also ceased support and production a few years after its launch.
