Chromebooks are about to get even more connected with a new notification setting appearing on devices in the Dev channel.
The new feature was captured and sent in to Chrome Unboxed as a tip by a reader who found it on his Samsung Chromebook Plus. The toggle appears under the settings menu, under a ‘Connected Devices’ sub-heading, with the toggle defined as ‘Get notifications for new text messages on your Chromebook’, seems pretty straightforward in terms of what it offers.
The team managed to do some testing got the option appearing after enabling a new flag in the Chrome Dev channel:
Enable multidevice features Chrome OS
Enables UI for controlling multidevice features. #multidevice
Once enabled, the new setting lets them do…absolutely nothing. It’s very much not live as yet, with ChromeUnboxed finding that the toggle turns itself off as soon as you exit settings, so it’s a placeholder for an upcoming feature.
Exactly how this will be integrated will be interesting to see. It could possibly be tied to your Google account with permissions on your phone allowing new incoming SMS to be parsed and communicated through your account before appearing on your Chromebook. Perhaps Google Assistant may be involved in some way, with new changes to Chrome OS expecting Google Assistant to appear on Chromebooks soon as well.
It’s an interesting new development, and would offer a lot of functionality especially if they manage to get replies etc. working. Tie this in with other messaging functions and Google might have a decent chance at winning the messaging business of many users back.
I use “Join” on my Chrome browser on Linux and my Nexus 5X. I can get SMS notifications and send and receive SMSs from the desktop. It is in the Chrome Web Store. I cannot see why it would not work on a Chromebook. Having a similar function supplied by Google would be handy.