When you’re cranking away on the computer, stopping to answer a text message can be an annoying interruption. Yes, it’s very much the definition of a first-world problem, but that doesn’t mean it’s not something worth solving.
The fix is to use a service that syncs your text messages with your PC. This way you can get the message, type a response, and get back to what you were doing. There is no native Android solution, but here are four rather solid options.
With those programs, you can easily transfer Android text messages to a computer. It can be a Windows PC or Apple Mac computer. First, download and install the program on a computer; Then connect the phone to computer with USB cable. The Your Phone feature will roll out to all Windows users on or around Oct. In June, Google released its own Web-based Android messaging app that works on both Mac and Windows devices.
None are perfect, but here are four of the most reliable options for keeping you connected to your Android phone’s text messages from the desktop.
MightyText
MightyText was born with this very problem in mind. It does an admirable job at doing exactly what you need in this respect—syncing up your texts into a web client that you can then use to message.
You need to install the Android app and give the requisite permissions to access your messages and phone calls (MightyText can also dial out). The interface is pretty easy to use, with some theme customizations available. You can use the web app or grab a Chrome extension for continued access.
There are definitely some quirks. When you first sync up your messages, those that you’ve archived with Android Messages will also appear in your list (you can delete them from MightyText). You can send GIFs, but the recipient will get them as a link instead of embedded with the message.
And as with much of life, not everything is free. A $5 per month (or $60 per year) pro plan gets you beyond the 250 message limit per month, and offers other advanced features like notification mirroring and the ability to save and schedule drafts.
AirDroid
One of the original apps to mirror your phone to the desktop, AirDroid remains a solid option for keeping your texts in sync across your desktop and phone.
When you grab the Android app and create an account, you’ll be able to sync up not just those messages but other notifications that come from your phone. There’s a desktop app for Windows, Mac, and Chrome that puts your messages and links to other content from your phone at the ready.
A word of caution on the Windows version: during installation there’s an offer to install a rather spammy search extension into Chrome. It’s an unnecessary piece of software that will force you to re-enable Google as the default search in Chrome. Just avoid it.
Beyond that, AirDroid does the job well. It’s loaded with other tricks beyond just messaging, like taking a screenshot and displaying all your notifications.
If you want to use AirDroid on an unlimited number of devices, get unlimited file transfer, and a batch of other features then you’ll need the $20 per year premium plan.
Pulse
Pulse is a lean, fast, full-featured SMS app with a great Material Design aesthetic. It doesn't go overboard on the features, but it's fast and smooth and has support for inserting GIFs, photos, and location. It's got some nice customization options for tweaking color, font, day/night modes, and which options you want on the notification shade.
That's all in the free Android app. Using the app just as a SMS client is free forever (and it's pretty good at what it does).
If you want to message from your tablet and computer, you can pay for a 'message from anywhere' upgrade. After a free one week trial, that will cost you either $0.99 per month, $1.99 for 3 months, or $5.99 per year. If you just want to pay once and be done with it forever, you can do that for $10.99.
The money goes toward fully encrypting your messages, and keeping the apps ad-free. No SMS/MMS app can secure your messages as they're sent to your contacts (only over-the-top internet messaging platforms can do that), but Pulse does do end-to-end encryption of your messages between your devices and its server. So they can't see your information, and can't sell it. But they do need it (at least in encrypted form) to keep your devices in sync.
Once you shell out for the upgrade, you can use a Chrome app, chrome web extension, Firefox extension, or the Pulse website to text and send SMS and MMS messages right from your Windows PC, Mac, or Chromebook. Or grab the app on a tablet that only has Wi-Fi to text from that. It even supports AndroidTV and Android Wear 2.0!
Pulse is made by the same people who make EvolveSMS, a highly customizable texting app for power users. EvolveSMS gives you a ton of options, but its cloud sync was always done through some third-party service. Pulse is a little different. It's simple, quick, fully integrated, and it just works.
Google Voice
It’s easy to consider Google Voice an afterthought. The service, which Google acquired ten years ago, seemed to languish in obscurity before a sudden burst of life earlier this year.
It now does the stated purpose very well—mirroring texts, calls, and voicemails across your devices.
The rub is that you either have to use a new phone number that Google assigns you, or import your own number into Voice. But doing that will result in a fee from your carrier, which will then require a new phone number while Google Voice operates as your shadow phone number.
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This means Voice probably isn’t the ideal solution for those who don’t want the hassle of surrendering their number over to Google or changing over to a new one. Beyond that, Google has done a good job at modernizing the way Voice works.
The SMS and MMS integration looks solid and is reliable. The app will be an important part of Google’s strategy to push RCS across to other carriers, and it should support this when you’re communicating with someone’s phone that does.
This list tells you one thing for sure, and it’s that getting this functionality is still a bit messy. There’s no universal, first-party solution that works as flawlessly as Apple’s iMessage works across iPhone, iPad, and Mac. If you want that same type of consistency, then an over-the-top service might be the way to go.
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You’re sitting at your PC and you receive a text message, so you pick up your phone, unlock it, read the message, and type one back using the tiny touch screen keyboard. Why not use your PC instead? If you’re already sitting at your computer, you can easily take advantage of your computer’s keyboard to send and receive text messages.
While this certainly isn’t a new idea, it has come a long way over the last few years. Today we’re going to take a look at a handful of the best apps available for Android for SMS-to-PC syncing.
Free Text App For MacMightyText (Free for Limited Use, $4.99/Month or $39.99/Year for Pro)
MightyText is probably the longest-running SMS-from-PC app available for Android, and with good reason: it’s also one of the best. It’s incredibly reliable, efficient, and easy to use. You log into both the smartphone app and webapp with your Google account, so you can reliably send SMS and MMS messages from your PC, even if it’s not on the same Wi-Fi network as your phone.
It works pretty simply: the MightyText services hangs out in the background of your Android phone, watching for new SMS or MMS messages to show up. When one does, it grabs the content and forwards it to the desktop client, so you get your messages in basically real-time. The message is also left untouched in the messaging app on your Android phone—MightyText doesn’t modify any message in any way.
There is one main downside to using MightyText: free message sending is limited to 250 messages per month. This wasn’t always the case, so if you’ve tried MightyText in the past, you probably didn’t have to deal with this. You can remove this limit with MightyText Pro, which is $4.99 a month (or $39.99 a year), and also brings themes, scheduled messaging, templates, signatures, removed storage limits, no ads, and more. You can find out more about MightyText’s paid service here.
MySMS (Free for Basic Use, $9.99 Per Year for Premium)
If you’re looking for a lot of bang for your buck, MySMS might just be perfect for you. The premise is the same as MightyText, but you won’t find any sending limits in the free version—in fact, unless you need advanced messaging options, you can probably get away with just using the free version.
The primary difference with MySMS is that you have to use the MySMS app as your primary messaging app. That means giving up your preferred SMS/MMS app in lieu of the one offered by MySMS. It’s not a terrible app, but it’s also not as full-featured as some of the others out there.
If you decide that the basic option just isn’t enough for you, the Premium upgrade adds a lot of bang for not a lot of money. You’ll get call management on the PC, scheduled messaging, SMS sync to another phone, text archiving to Dropbox, Evernote, and Drive; export options, and full message backups. All for $9.99 a month. That’s solid.
Pushbullet (Free for Basic Use, $4.99/Month or $39.99/Year for Pro)Text App For Mac Android Phone Recovery
Pushbullet is easily one of the most popular Android apps in recent years, because if offers a lot of advanced functionality that you’d normally need multiple apps to accomplish. The company did cause quite a stir when it decided to offer a premium model, however, as some of that functionality is now behind a paywall. Still, at $4.99 a month or $39.99 for a year, you’re still getting a lot of functionality.
While the SMS-from-PC feature is just one of the tricks up Pushbullet’s sleeve, it’s probably the most reliable service I’ve used (and I’ve used them all). The problem is that it’s limited to 100 free messages per month before requiring a Pro account, but ponying up that five bucks a month will also get you Universal Copy/Paste, Mirror Notification Actions, and priority support from the Pushbullet team.
Honestly, even if you’re not interested in using Pushbullet as an SMS client on your PC, the app is a must-have app for every Android user. To get a closer look at everything Pushbullet can do, head here.
![]() Windows Text App For AndroidAirdroid (Free for Basic Use, $1.99/Month, $19.99/Year, or $38.99/Two Years for Premium)
Airdroid is probably the most interesting app of the bunch, because it handles everything very differently from the others. Like Pushbullet, it’s far more than just a basic SMS from PC app—it’s essentially a remote access app that can almost remotely control your phone from your PC. It has advanced notification mirroring, so you can not only send and receive SMS and MMS messages on your PC, but also interact with most other apps, like the dialer, WhatsApp, Facebook, and more.
What makes Airdroid so unique is how it handles connecting to your phone. Unlike the others on this list, which all work with your Google account, Airdroid connects to your phone over Wi-Fi. It then gives you a desktop-like interface that allows you to control your phone remotely. It’s really cool.
Airdroid offers a webapp, as well as Windows and Mac desktop apps. To find out more about Airdroid, head here.
There are more options for remotely accessing your SMS messages than ever before, with some of the available apps offering even more advanced functionality. It really comes down to what features you’re looking for and how much you want to pay—if SMS and MMS messaging is all you’re after, MySMS is probably the way to go; if you’d like to get more bang for your buck, it’s definitely worth exploring Pushbullet and Airdroid.
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