Microsoft Adds Music, Audio Control Capabilities To Its Your Phone App

Microsoft is continuing to add new features to its Your Phone app. The latest, announced this week, is the ability to control music and audio directly from within the Your Phone app.

With this new feature -- which Microsoft is rolling out to Windows users running Windows 10 1809 (the October 2018 update) or more recent -- users will be able to see and interact with the audio apps playing from their Android phones (running 7.0 or later) directly on their PC. Audio title track details will be displayed and remain in sync with what's playing on the phone.

Examples of some of the apps that support media controls in their notifications include Spotify, Pandora, Amazon Music, Google Play Music, YouTube Music, Xiami Music and Google podcast.

This feature will be rolling out over the next few days. The "show audio currently playing from my phone" feature will be turned on by default in Your Phone as long as notification permissions are granted. 

Although the Your Phone app is meant to work with both Android and iOS devices, very few of its features are available on iPhones because of Apple's restrictions on how apps can work with its devices.  

Microsoft announced this new feature on April 29, simultaneous with the arrival of a new Windows 10 Fast Ring test build (No. 19619). There are no new features in this build, but a number of bug fixes.

As I've mentioned before, I believe that Microsoft is close to finalizing the Windows 10 20H2 feature update; if they stick to past schedules, this should be "done" by June 2020. Even though Microsoft officials say the Fast Ring builds technically are no longer are aligned with particular feature releases, the 2020 H2 feature update is expected to be minor and delivered similarly to the way 1909 was, meaning almost like a small cumulative update which will include relatively few new features.