Just to give this a little bit of a preface, I’ve been a Phone Link user since it was dropped in Windows. Every laptop or desktop I’ve ever owned is connected to my Samsung phone. I’m an ecosystem guy; I like my workflow to be uninterrupted, so if I can control multiple devices and services without taking my hands off the keyboard, that’s a win for me. The lack of phone integration is what originally led me to join Apple and its ecosystem, a place I stayed for a decade mainly for the integration.
When Phone Link was introduced, it was a bit buggy, I must admit, struggling to keep my device connected or send and receive basic text messages. Over the years, it’s gotten much better, and features have been released. Being able to copy/paste between phone and PC, for example, is a big win. Running my favorite Android apps directly from my phone and pinning the icons to the taskbar all keep my workflow moving. Not to mention the ability to be connected to multiple PCs and keep everything in sync.
It’s not perfect, likely never will be, as Android phones and PCs are all different; it’s not a closed ecosystem like the iPhone and Apple devices are. Over the past couple of months, I’ve noticed a decline in Phone Link reliability, more so on my Snapdragon devices. I’ve yet to reproduce this issue on any Intel or AMD devices. So what was happening?
At first, I thought it was my Snapdragon PC giving me trouble or something in a recent Windows Update. The performance of my PC would just fall on its face every 3 or 4 days: apps would be slow, Windows would be slow to respond, and even my local LAN would take a hit. A reboot would solve the issue again, for just a few days. I dismissed it as me, being a heavy user, maybe I’m just asking too much of the Snapdragon X Elite CPU.
But I like my Snapdragon PCs, yes, I know that sounds like I might have a weird relationship with a device, and maybe I do, these devices have performed and got me through situations when everything else felt like it was crumbling around me, so I didn’t want to give up that easily. As it continued to happen, I’d check Task Manager, and everything would look normal. I’d close apps to lessen the load, but still no dice. Terrible performance continued. So I decided to just leave task manager open on a secondary screen to see if I noticed anything abnormal. When I was dragging Phone Link to the secondary display, I noticed the window “jerked” for lack of a better way to describe it. When it jerked, I saw several Phone Link processes appear. As long as I held the mouse down on the Phone Link window, the processes remained. If I released the mouse click, then they seemed to disappear after a few seconds. During those few seconds, I grabbed one of the Phone Link tasks and right-clicked on it, choosing to end the process. I then reopened the phone link, and it has run fine ever since.
If you reboot, the process repeats, but ending Phone Link in the task manager once you see the repeat processes seems to fix the problem for me consistently. While I cannot confirm, from my note-taking, this did start around the time Microsoft announced the latest upgrade to the translation layer, Prism.
Does your Phone Link work properly, or are you having issues? Did this help you? Leave us a comment down below.
