Motorola’s Smart Connect: The Must-Have App You Didn’t Know You Needed!
Windows and Android is a pretty popular combination that sucks together. Many companies have tried to improve the cross-platform interface, but I think Motorola just hit gold with their new Smart Connect App. Let me show you how.
Imagine reading something on your Android phone and wanting to copy it to your Windows laptop. Now, you can just copy the content from your phone and paste it on your laptop.
It was priceless to experience that for the first time. If you thought that was cool, then check this out.
Let’s say you found a funny meme on your laptop that you want to share with your friends. You can drag the meme to a floating bar on your laptop and it’s instantly available on your phone!
The best part is that it works both ways!
These features are natively available with Motorola devices but you can probably get it working on any Android device! Here’s how.
First, download and install the Smart Connect app on your Windows device from the Microsoft Store.
The initial setup is pretty straightforward on the Windows app. You just have to follow the prompts appearing on screen.
You would have a QR ready to be scanned by the end of this process.
Things are a bit more complicated on the Android side. As of writing this story, the Smart Connect app is not officially downloadable from the Play Store.
As with any other Android app though, you will be able to get the APK from many external websites.
I got the APK from the website APKCombo, which you can download from this link.
After installation, tap on Get started and follow the prompts until you finally scan the QR code and pair up with your device.
On your Windows device, you might have to restart Windows to enable the sync features, but apart from that, that’s basically it!
Just tap on any of the features that you want to use them. Some might require you to accept permissions, but apart from that, this is a very smooth and easy setup.
One of my favorite features is Files, which lets me directly browse the contents of my laptop.
Screenshots you take on the devices are synced across, meaning you can take a screenshot on your Windows device, and it’ll be available on your Android device and vice-versa. This could cause a pileup in both your Downloads folder but an occasional clean-up will keep things tidy.
The Downsides and The Future
We aren’t living in a fairytale for these apps to work flawlessly. From the limited time that I have used it, there are a lot of bugs.
For example, with some files, trying to share them over Share Hub on Windows causes the app to crash. It does not restart automatically. I have to manually reopen the Windows app to get it running again.
The Share Hub popup does not always show up on the Android device, and you would have to open Share Hub from the app to access your latest share.
The Phone on PC feature is entirely non-functional on my device.
I’m sure there are many other issues that the apps have that I haven’t discovered yet, but for me, this is a big step up from what we used to have. I’ve had numerous occasions where I’d have to send a link to myself in Telegram or WhatsApp just to open it on my phone. I have had instances where I needed to search for my USB cable to transfer that one large file from my laptop to my phone. But now I can do all this with the help of this one app!
Without hesitation, I’d say that Motorola has hit gold with this one. Opening it up to the entire Android Community would be the first step in the right direction. I have been using Microsoft’s Phone Link for some time, and I believe it offers the additional features that would make Smart Connect a powerhouse: the ability to make and receive calls, and send and receive SMS messages, directly from the Windows device.
With the addition of these two features, Smart Connect would be such an amazing tool for a lot of people. For the Windows-Android community, synchronization between the devices have been an age-old problem and this has the potential to be the go-to solution. Let’s all hope that Motorola realizes the power of the dragon they’ve just woken up and decides to double down on the development of this application.
Thank you for reading.