The Windows 10 Anniversary Update is out this week, and it offers an interesting mobile feature aimed not at Windows Phone, but at Android: mirrored Android notifications. The idea is that when a notification pops up on your Android phone, it should also pop up on your Windows PC, allowing you to then deal with your notifications remotely on the PC. For now most of the features come with a well-deserved "beta" tag, but it's worth a look to see where this feature is and how much more work needs to be done.

Beaming Android notifications to your PC isn't a new idea—third-party apps like Pushbullet and AirDroid can already do it, but it's still interesting that Microsoft has introduced its own first-party implementation (it's also a tacit admission that Microsoft's own mobile platform is quickly fading). The way all these services work is to basically "become a really big smartwatch." The services plug in to all of the remote notification capabilities Google originally introduced for Android Wear, but they're available to any app that is granted the proper permissions. We'd expect our ideal notification service to be able to do everything Android Wear can do with a notification, just inside of a PC app instead of a watch.

In Android 4.3, Google added a Notification API, which can mirror the entire notification panel to another device. Apps can sign up to be a Notification Listener Service, which allows the remote app to dismiss notifications on the phone and to remotely press the notification action buttons. These are things like "Archive" or "Delete" for e-mails and "Reply" for e-mails, IMs, and SMSes. The transportation of these notifications all happens at the OS level and requires no developer support.

Google also added the Remote Input API for messaging apps. After remotely pressing the "reply" button, normally this just pops up the keyboard on a phone and opens a reply dialog, which isn't very useful. The Remote Input API allows the remote device to send a string of text (via voice or typing) to the device instead, and this text gets posted as a message. This is something developers specifically have to build into their apps, but most of the big messaging apps support it.

With those capabilities available, our wish list for a good notification mirroring service becomes clear:

Display all notifications quickly. Display all the information from a notification. Remotely dismiss notifications. Remotely press action buttons. Remotely send "reply" text. Let me "dive in" to a notification by launching the appropriate app/website when clicked on.

Can Windows do it?

Setup













All of these services require some kind of account system and desktop app to sync notifications between Android and the PC. For Pushbullet, that's an OAuth Google login and a Chrome extension; for AirDroid it's an OAuth login and a Windows app; for Windows 10's notification mirroring it's a Microsoft account and Cortana. You've already got Cortana on your Windows 10 box—you just need to install the Cortana Android app, sign in to a Microsoft account on both devices, and give Cortana lots of permissions.

As expected, Cortana asks for the "notification access" permission, which means it uses the Notification Listener Service just like Android Wear. The Cortana app has check boxes for "Missed calls," "Incoming messages," and "low battery notifications," but the real power is the "App notification sync" check box. This makes the previous three options redundant and gives you notifications for all your apps. In this screen, you can add or remove any app from the push notification list, which is important since you probably won't want every notification making the jump to your PC.

On the Windows side of things, you'll need to enable Cortana (if it isn't already enabled) and turn on the "Sync Notifications" option. There you should see your phone in the list of devices, and as long as that happens, setup is done.

What works

















At Build 2016, Microsoft promised Android SMS mirroring and that remotely dismissing notifications would work on the Windows 10 Anniversary Update. For the most part, it does.

Your Android notifications will show up in the Win 10 notification panel, right next to native notifications. They'll have a tag that says "From [name of phone]" to denote that they are remote notifications. Like you would expect, an SMS pops up with a text of the message and the sender's name. After you expand the notification, there's a "reply" box that lets you quickly type out a response, which Cortana sends to your phone and delivers. On the phone, Cortana will spawn a confirmation message letting you know the SMS was sent. Missed call notifications work pretty much the same way—including the reply box so you can respond with a text message.

Remotely dismissing notifications is an important feature, since after a hard day of computing on your PC, you don't want to pick up your smartphone and see a bunch of redundant notifications. Dismissing a notification on your PC should also dismiss the notification on the phone. Windows 10 can remotely dismiss Android notifications, but it only does it on one of the dismiss methods.

The problem is there are many dismiss methods. Basically the "new" Dismiss button—the big checkbox button with "Dismiss" text at the bottom of every Android notification—will remotely dismiss a notification. All the "old" Windows 10 methods of dismissing a notification—the "X" button in the top right, the "clear all" button, and swiping away a notification—will only dismiss the Windows notification, leaving the Android phone notification present. Notification dismissal doesn't work the other way, either. Clearing a notification on your phone will not remove it from Windows.