Googlebooks' phone handoff mostly works, but app-pinning sticks to Docs and Sheets for now

If you click a Slack notification on a Googlebook, it can open the phone's copy of Slack, cast onto the laptop, instead of the web app or a native one ^[10]. That user now has Slack twice. Casting puts phone apps in their own app drawer next to the laptop's, so duplicates are normal. Nothing stops someone from running the desktop and mobile versions of the same app side by side, Chrome included ^[9].

The pitch is that the laptop acts on the phone. Windows will sync a phone's notifications and macOS will mirror a whole iPhone. A Googlebook lets you take actions on the phone from the laptop, in a way The Verge said feels natural ^[4]. The reviewers added the condition themselves: "When it works, of course." ^[5]

A lot of it does work. In The Verge's testing, casting apps, moving a task from phone to laptop with one click, opening phone files and getting phone notifications all worked well, and pulling files off the phone "just works" ^[15].

Teams will tell themselves that users will hand off whatever they were doing on the phone. In practice the reviewers could hand off mostly Docs and Sheets. Google Maps and Calendar were among the apps that would not move ^[8]. The casted apps that do run sometimes show blurry text and scroll more slowly than native ones ^[11]. So for the person supporting this on Friday, the question is how much of a team's day happens in those two Google apps.

Google's new Play Store desktop labels ^[12] give an admin a list to check a team's apps against before ordering anything. The Verge still called Android apps on these machines "still a mixed bag" ^[13].

So far the evidence is the reviewers' first day with five machines ^[2]. Their summary was "exciting but underbaked," with "a long road ahead" ^[14]. I would not standardize a fleet on a day of reviewer time.

I'd sort users by two things: whether they carry an Android phone, and whether their work happens in Docs and Sheets. Android users who work in Docs and Sheets get the full handoff, and they are the group to pilot with now. Android users on other tools get casting, file access and notifications, and casting is the part with the blur and the lag ^[11]. For iPhone users, the tools don't matter. The product is built around an Android phone ^[6], so this group is buying a laptop The Verge described as Chromebook-ish and at times a little janky ^[3]. A mixed-phone workforce gets two different products from one purchase order.

I recommend a small pilot with the Android-and-Docs users. The cost is a second laptop OS for the support desk during the pilot, plus someone ready to explain why there are two Slacks ^[9].