For years now, we Android fans have been a bit jealous of Apple’s Continuity features and seamless integration across its ecosystem of devices. The best one of the bunch is the instant hotspot, where you don’t have to manually set up a hotspot to share your data connection with your secondary phone or tablet when they’re nearby — it just works .
You might not know, though, that Android has had this same feature since last September. It rolled out as part of a new “Cross-device services” menu, which came to many Android phones in a Play System update. If none of these words mean anything to you, you’re not alone. Everyone I’ve talked to about it — including several tech journalists and nerdy friends — had no idea about this secret Android instant hotspot option, nor how to enable it.