How to get your MacBook and Android phone to function well together

Although Apple’s ecosystem may be the greatest option, Android users aren’t completely out of luck.

The Apple ecosystem is ideal if you exclusively own Apple products. You can quickly sync all of your data between your laptop, phone, and tablet to allow for easy switching between working locations. It’s more challenging if you own a MacBook and an excellent Android phone. There are ways to make your Android phone and MacBook operate better together if you’ve never had the impulse to convert from Android to iOS for that reason. Though nothing will be perfect, things may turn out better than you could have ever imagined.

Messaging: Web services and apps

You might never be able to use the pre-installed and fully integrated Apple Messages software with iMessage if you’re an Android user. But you can utilize the Google Messages web app as long as blue bubble envy isn’t an issue for you or your friends. It’s a well-designed, polished program that works well as a messaging client on your MacBook. There are native applications for a ton of other apps. On macOS, Telegram, WhatsApp Desktop, and Signal perform incredibly well.

As an added bonus, we suggest Flotato for Google Messages. The program transforms any website into something that resembles a native application more than a website, complete with a dock icon and a windowed interface devoid of the URL and tab bar you are used to from your browser. It is lightweight and gentle on your battery because it is based on the rendering engine Apple employs in Safari. This technique might feel more natural given that Chrome web apps are a little awkward on macOS (you can’t entirely leave Chrome while using them).

If you want to use Flotato for more than Google Messages and perhaps one or two additional apps, you’ll need to pay $19, but otherwise, it’s totally free. Only the number of windows from various online apps that can be open simultaneously is restricted.

Continuity: All synced up with cloud storage

Moving between devices in the Apple ecosystem might seem magical. With the touch of a button, you may open a document you started working on another device thanks to features like Handoff, and iCloud handles the rest. However, this only applies to apps that use Apple’s technique; other services may come with their own built-in Handoff or Continuity features.

You might never miss these capabilities if you’re an avid user of Microsoft Office or Google Workspace. Thanks to the cloud, you can edit a Google Docs or Microsoft Word document on your phone and then smoothly access it on your MacBook. The same holds true for Google Photos’ basic photo editing. Everything is properly synchronised with your browser’s Photos web app. Any Android phone and any PC with a supported browser can use these syncing techniques. They might give you the impression that, in comparison to people who own an iPhone and a MacBook, you aren’t really missing out.

You can use Microsoft Office or Google Drive to scan documents. While macOS has a straightforward shortcut that enables you to insert a photo or document directly from an iPhone’s camera, this is not a significant improvement over utilizing the first two ways on your phone. It’s true that Apple’s feature, which enables you to insert an iPhone photo into a document already open on your Mac, is quite cool, but you can accomplish the same task with a few more clicks using Google Drive, Photos, or Microsoft OneDrive.

The two best services for syncing files are Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive, while it is also possible to transfer files back and forth between Macs and Android devices using a USB-C adapter. If you’re looking for a simple way to sync files between Android and macOS, any cloud service other than iCloud could be of great help.

AirDrop, tab syncing, and phone calls: Chrome

When you wish to sync your open tabs and transfer data between the two, iPhones and Macs can function together, but the advantages are only accessible if you use Safari on both devices. And in this case, Chrome and Android can work well together.

You can sync your browsing history, logins, open tabs, and other things with Chrome between Android and macOS. Chrome has the option to send phone numbers from websites to your phone, which you can then use to contact the numbers, but it does not allow you to call phone numbers from your Mac. The right-click menu in Chrome now enables you to email URLs to your phone and the reverse. Even while this isn’t an all-encompassing, completely integrated solution, it works well enough in many situations. You can drag files into your Google Drive storage for the remaining tasks.

Clipboard sharing with Clipt

You won’t discover a similarly nice option for Android and Mac if you want seamless clipboard syncing like Apple provides across iPhone, iPad, and macOS. With the exception of keyboards, background apps on Android 10 and higher are no longer permitted to see what is currently in your clipboard. That’s great if you use a Windows computer because SwiftKey allows for clipboard syncing; however, for Mac, we haven’t discovered a comparable convenient option.