Microsoft is rolling out an “anniversary update” for Windows 10 this summer, and among other things, it’ll include an updated Action Center for notifications and settings. One of the coolest new features? You’ll be able to view and respond to notifications from your phone from Windows… and that’s true whether you’re using a Windows Phone or an Android one.
There is a catch: you’ll need to install Microsoft’s Cortana app on your Android device if you want to sync your notifications. But once you do that, you’ll be able to see text messages, missed calls, or other notifications on your phone. Want to respond to a chat message? You should be ale to do that on your Windows PC instead without unlocking your Android phone.
If you do have Windows 10 on your phone, it will also get the new Action Center, and your notifications will be synchronized across devices so that you can dismiss them on one device and have them disappear from all of your device. The goal is to let you dismiss notifications on you Android phone the same way, but again, this only works if you’ve got Cortana installed on your phone.
While Microsoft also offers a Cortana app for iOS, it doesn’t have as much access to the underlying operating system as the Android version, so it can’t sync your notifications to a Windows 10 PC the same way.
Other new features in the Windows 10 Anniversary Update are improved support for digital pen input, support for using the Windows Hello biometric security feature with the Edge web browser to login to websites using a fingerprint or iris or facial recognition, and the inclusion of an Ubuntu Linux subsystem that lets you run a Bash shell in Windows.