Your Windows PC will soon better integrate with more Android phones

Xiaomi is starting to preinstall Link to Windows on its phones, making them better integrate with Windows PCs.

Your Windows PC will soon better integrate with more Android phones
  • New Xiaomi phones come preinstalled with Microsoft’s Link to Windows app, which provides various cross-device features.
  • By preinstalling Link to Windows, Xiaomi devices will have access to new features including clipboard sync and app streaming.
  • So far, only the new Xiaomi 14T comes with Link to Windows preinstalled.

If you buy one of the best Android phones on the market, there’s a decent chance you already have or plan to pick up a laptop as well. To encourage you to buy or stick with the Windows ecosystem, Microsoft created the Link to Windows app to make your Android phone and Windows PC work better together. For Link to Windows to work best, though, it needs to be preinstalled on your Android phone, which not many do. Thankfully, this has changed over the years, though there are still some notable holdouts. Today, though, one of the major smartphone brands that held off on bundling Link to Windows has changed course.

Xiaomi, the smartphone brand that just momentarily dethroned Apple as the world’s number two seller, announced its latest flagship phones today, the Xiaomi 14T and Xiaomi 14T Pro. Ahead of the launch event, Xiaomi shared a document with us that highlighted how “Link to Windows provides a genuinely integrated PC computing experience” on the 14T Pro. We asked the company what it meant by this and were told that it plans to integrate the Link to Windows app into HyperOS, which is Xiaomi’s flavor of Android.