Last year, Microsoft added a sidebar to the Start menu in the Windows 11 2024 Update, allowing Android users to quickly access their phone’s battery status, notifications, messages, calls, and photos. Now, Microsoft is bringing a similar feature to iPhone owners with Windows 11 laptops or PCs.
Last year, Microsoft added a sidebar to the Start menu in the Windows 11 2024 Update, allowing Android users to quickly access their phone’s battery status, notifications, messages, calls, and photos. Now, Microsoft is bringing a similar feature to iPhone owners with Windows 11 laptops or PCs.
Windows Insiders can already start experimenting with accessing iPhones from the Start menu in Windows 11, notes The Verge.
«This seamless integration allows iPhone users to enjoy the same benefits as Android users, including the ability to view battery status and phone connectivity, access messages and calls, and track recent activities, all conveniently integrated into the Start menu,» Microsoft explained in its blog.
This sidebar in Start is an extension of the Connect to Your Phone feature that Microsoft has been improving over the past few years. In 2023, it was updated to allow you to use iMessage with a PC that uses Bluetooth to intercept incoming messages.
The new Start menu interface also lets you share files between Android or iPhone devices, which will speed up the transfer of photos or documents between your Windows PC and your phone. Microsoft first started testing iPhone file sharing on Windows PCs in December, and it also lets you share files using the built-in Share feature in Windows 11.
These new Start menu features will be available to Windows Insiders in the development and beta channels, after which Microsoft will most likely roll them out to all Windows 11 users in the coming months.
Recall that according to Bloomberg sources, Apple is working with SpaceX and T-Mobile to add support for the Starlink satellite internet network to the latest version of iOS 18.3 software for iPhones. The beta version is also available to some users with Android 15.
