I built Pushbullet because it should be easier to send things to your phone from your computers.

Before Pushbullet, if I wanted a file on my phone from my desktop or laptop, I could either hook my phone up and transfer it, put the file in Dropbox and download it on my phone through the Dropbox app, or, as I often did, add it as an attachment to a draft email in Gmail and download it from the Gmail app. All of these ways suck.

With Pushbullet, I can push the file right from my computer to my phone and, importantly, into my phone’s notifications. This means when I pick my phone up, I can get to that file instantly with a click on the notification. So much better.

What else can Pushbullet do?

Google Maps is probably the most useful app on my phone, but I’ve realized that I often research a restaurant or look up a store on my laptop and then, once I’ve found what I’m looking for, I run a search in the Google Maps app to find the same place in order to start Navigation. This can be so much easier.

With Pushbullet, I just push the address or a search query to my phone and start navigation by just clicking the notification. Oh, and since I don’t have a code to secure my phone, I can get to my notifications without unlocking my phone which means starting up Navigation is as easy as a top-down swipe and a click. Cool.

Ok, give me one more.

Everybody goes grocery shopping and everybody has their phone with them while they’re shopping, but I would still write my grocery list on a piece of paper or, if I felt fancy, maybe I’d write it up on my computer and email it to myself. More likely I don’t even write one, but then I’m sure to forget something. See the problem here? I don’t have the patience it takes to type up the list on my phone, and even if I did, I can’t get the satisfaction of crossing things off (it totally matters).

This is an obvious fix–now I just type up the list and push it to my phone with Pushbullet. It’ll be waiting for me in my notification tray and with a click I can see the whole list and check things off as I go. Not bad.

What’s coming next?

Pushbullet is a brand new service so there’s way more to come than exists right now. A big shortcoming is that Pushbullet only flows one direction right now, from your browser to your phone. As I continue to improve Pushbullet, this is an obvious thing to address. You should be able to do anything you can do on the web in the app, and it should seamlessly sync.

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