Chrome Gets Shared Clipboard Feature Between Android And PC
Convergence between all tier of devices (laptop, Desktop, Smartphone) has long been the elusive holy grail of the tech world.
The first serious attempt at converging the realms of devices that the everyday user uses came from Canonical whose take at creating a singular platform for varying use cases didn’t gain as much traction as the open-source juggernaut would’ve hoped.
Microsoft did later took up the idea with Windows 8, but we know how that turned.
However, convergence isn’t necessarily a dead idea as other company’s including Samsung continue to take a dig at making it easy to switch between several instances without hampering immersion.
Google isn’t really attempting a serious take on true convergence but the company is, however, working on a feature that could potentially be the next best thing.
The company is adding a “Shared clipboard” feature to Chrome that could give users the ability to share content between their desktops and Android smartphones through Chrome. This follows hot on the heels of something called “Send to Your Devices” which works in a similar fashion but for webpages.
You shouldn’t get too excited though as the feature only landed on Chrome Canary and is hidden behind a flag.
However, if you are someone that loves to thinker around, here are the steps to follow if you want to activate the feature.
First, though, you must have Chrome Canary installed on both your desktop and mobile devices. Then on the desktop version of Chrome, enter chrome://flags/ in the address bar.
After entering, the next step is to look up “clipboard” in the search bar on the page.
You should be presented with a page similar to the above, what you should next is to click on the drop-down menu with “Default” as the preset option and select “Enabled” for all three flags.
You should see a prompt asking you to relaunch the browser, click the relaunch button.
Note: These steps are only required for the Desktop version of Chrome Canary, no activity is needed for the one installed on your smartphone.
You are all set and from this point, you can select any text on any webpage in Canary and then right-click to unveil the option, “Send text to <device name>.” You should get a popup notification alerting you that text has been added to your clipboard.
To use the copied text from the clipboard, long-press inside any text field and tap on Paste like in the example used with Google’s Messages app.
Note 2: You can enable the flags on the Android version of Chrome Canary, doing so would allow you to share the copy text like shown above. Once you select the text and choose “Share” from the menu that appears, you’ll see an option in Android’s share sheet to share it to other devices running Canary.
