- The Phone Link app can once again mirror certain sensitive notifications from your Android phone to your Windows PC.
- The Android 15 update blocked Link to Windows from mirroring notifications with two-factor authentication codes as the OS deemed them “sensitive.”
- Microsoft has found a workaround that allows Phone Link to mirror these notifications, but the workaround isn’t available on all devices.
Microsoft’s Phone Link app makes it very easy to control your Android phone from a Windows PC. It can control your phone’s sound settings, show your phone’s text messages, start phone calls, pull your photos, and mirror your phone’s notifications, among other things. To mirror notifications, Phone Link uses Android’s standard API for reading notifications, specifically the notification listener API. Google recently blocked certain notifications from being read by most notification listeners, leaving Phone Link unable to mirror all notifications. Fortunately, Microsoft recently rolled out an update to Phone Link that resolves this issue.
Last year’s Android 15 update introduced a number of security changes, including one that protects two-factor authentication codes from malicious apps. Android 15 marks notifications containing these codes as sensitive, preventing them from being read by untrusted notification listener services. When a notification is marked sensitive, its content is replaced with the message, “sensitive notification content hidden.” While this security feature safeguards sensitive information, it also reduces the convenience of services like Phone Link.