Windows 11 gains clipboard sharing with Android devices

Microsoft has gone all in with its embrace of Android and its various moves towards making Windows 11 play nicely with Google’s mobile operating system.

We’ve already seen the Link to Windows app get some serious attention, and most recently Microsoft added a very Apple-like option to resume using a mobile app in Windows. An as-yet unannounced feature is clipboard sharing, and this has been unearthed in a preview build of Windows 11.

It was Windows Latest that first noticed the new option in Windows 11. Tucked away in the Manage mobile devices section within the latest Dev build of Windows 11 is an intriguing toggle labelled "Access PC’s clipboard"”". This toggle was spotted a few weeks back, but it promptly vanished, leading some people to think that clipboard sharing between Windows 11 and Android had been dropped.

But apparently not. The "Access PC’s clipboard" toggle is back – and it works. The toggle bears the description:

Allow this device to access content that I copy on this PC.

And that is very much what it does. When enabled, you can copy something to the clipboard in Windows 11 and it will be instantly available on your linked Android device ready for pasting.

Windows Latest tested the feature in conjunction with the Gboard keyboard and it worked precisely as you would want it to. It also worked with the Samsung keyboard, and there is no reason to think that any particular Android keyboard would not be compatible – in the end, at least.

At the moment, SwiftKey has problems, but it is important to remember that this is a feature that is very much in development. It is only available in the Dev build of Windows 11, so it is clearly not complete and there is plenty of time for issues to be ironed out.

Image credit: Windows Latest