After giving up on trying to disrupt the market with Windows Mobile, Windows Phone and later Windows 10 Mobile, Microsoft focused its efforts on bridging the gap between Windows and the established mobile platforms with the Your Phone (now Phone Link) app. Phone Link provides various features, effectively allowing you to control a smartphone from a computer. You can make and receive calls and messages, view notifications, share photos, and even stream Android apps to a big display.
Unfortunately, Phone Link supports only Android devices. Besides, some of its best capabilities are exclusive to Samsung smartphones. Are you using an iPhone? Are you still sticking to Windows Phone, the best mobile OS ever? Too bad — Phone Link supports none. What makes the situation worse is that Mobile Connect, a Phone Link analog from Dell, is going away. Therefore, enthusiast developers come to save the day.
MyPhone, a small open-source Phone Link analog from a developer called BestOwl, lets you bring some of the Phone Link"s capabilities to almost any relatively modern device. MyPhone uses Bluetooth to connect Android, iOS, and Windows Phone smartphones with a computer to provide calling capabilities on a PC without installing additional software on the phone. Windows Phone is not dead after all.
In a nutshell, MyPhone transforms your computer into a large hands-free device. You can accept and make calls using a built-in dial pad, plus transfer an ongoing call to the smartphone. Extra points go for using Windows 11-native UI with the eye candy.
Of course, MyPhone cannot and will not replace Phone Link or Dell Mobile. Currently, MyPhone is very limited in its capabilities, with calls being the only available feature. Still, the developer promises to add SMS support, phonebook access, and app notifications in future updates. The first two should be ready this summer with version 1.0.
Although MyPhone is free for everyone to download from GitHub, getting the app into a working state is somewhat a chore. It requires Visual Studio 2022 with .NET 6 and Windows SDK, plus the MSIX Packaging Tools extensions. After getting all the necessary files, do the following:
- Clone repo git clone https://github.com/BestOwl/MyPhone.git.
- Open MyPhone.sln with Visual Studio.
- Set MyPhone as startup project.
- Run MyPhone (Package).
You can find more information about MyPhone, the APIs it uses, and other interesting information related to the project in its GitHub repository.