By Ean McDonald - September 23rd, 2020

I'm writing this because I recently went through my own troubleshooting with my new phone. Not all android smartphones are the same even though they're running the same operating system. For instance, Samsung has a lot of their own software that comes prepackaged with their phones, and some of it is great, while other apps are not so great.

Your phone may have a text messaging app that works for you, but is missing some neat features that I'll be sharing a bit about. Some other applications that you may be interested in that I haven't checked out yet can be found here. Some are completely free, and others have a fee or subscription model.

One of my favourites is also the standard on some Android phones being "Android Messages" by Google which can be downloaded in the Google Play store. My new Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ came with the Samsung Messages. It works for sending and receiving texts, but I want a little more out of my communication. One of my favourite things about the Android Messages is that I can sign into https://messages.google.com/web to access my text messages on whatever computer I'm working on, and use my keyboard to respond instead of typing on the phone.

Trying out Android Messages in a web browser

To try this out, download the app from the Play Store. When you first open it up, your phone will probably ask if you want to make this your default text messaging app. If you're unsure at this point, you can select no or cancel (I forget what the options are) and you'll be able to make that decision later.

1. Select the vertical dot menu (I'm not sure if that's the official name, but I'm going with it).

2. Then select Messages for web near the top.

3. You'll be presented with the web address to type into your internet browser. Navigate to this page on the computer you want to connect with. Then, back on your phone push the blue button that says QR code scanner. Your phone will open up a special camera and you just need to point it at the code box on the website shown in your computer web browser.

<aside> 💡 If this is a private computer of yours and you don't want to do this process every time, select "Remember this computer" underneath the QR Code.

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