Microsoft has a default phone companion app for Windows PCs. It’s called Telephone Link. With Phone Link, you can receive important phone notifications on your desktop, copy and paste text between devices with ease, and much more. However, this application is very controlled. You need an online Microsoft account to access the main screen, only to discover that most of the good stuff is reserved for certain brands of smartphones (Samsung, mainly). Sefirah is an open source version of the Microsoft Phone Link concept. I’ve been using it for over a month and it’s surprisingly good at its job. Related 4 great features of Microsoft Phone Link that are available only to Samsung Galaxy phone owners You need a Samsung phone to get the most out of Phone Link All its features work on all Android phones Compatible with everything First, this app is completely free; There are no paywalls or ads. It is completely open source, available on the Google Play Store and all open source repositories. Even the repository is excellently maintained and documented, which is always a good sign. All its features work on all Android phones and the phone connects perfectly with Windows at all times. There is even an early version of Linux. Credit: GitHub/shrimqy Lastly, you don’t need an online account or any type of account to work (more on that in a moment). It connects quickly without any type of account. Pairs perfectly with a local Windows account. On Windows, it seems intentionally designed to look and feel familiar to people coming from Microsoft’s Phone Link. The phone app works very well. After connecting, the phone app shows me the status of my laptop’s battery and speaker controls. All you have to do is press the Add Device button on your phone. The onboarding dialog asks if you want to connect to a Linux or Windows PC. Automatically detects Windows computers connected to your home network. A screen appears on your Windows computer where you installed Sefirah. It asks for confirmation to connect and does so as soon as you click. It then asks where to save the incoming files. Finally, it throws you this long list of permission requests. Only the first two are essential for things like notifications or clipboard syncing. You can leave them disabled if you only need basic file sharing features. You can leave the rest of the settings as default. Clipboard sharing is simply perfect clipboard synchronization. Finally, when you copy text to one device, it is instantly copied to the other device. So when you copy text to your computer, you can pick up your phone and tap Paste. That’s all. It also works the other way around. There is a setting that I enabled that is not enabled by default. Images are usually not included in clipboard sharing, but when I turn it on in settings, I can copy and paste images between my phone and my computer. You can also enable an option to receive a toast message every time text is copied. This app sets the standard for file sharing between a phone and a PC. Move over, KDE Connect. There is a share icon below the phone status. This is used to send files to the phone. On your phone, you will find Sefirah in the Android sharing menu. The files appear on your device with an alert. You can also send multiple files at once. This is the simplest file sharing system I have seen in an application of this type. KDE Connect, another popular open source companion, can only send one file at a time from your computer to your phone. Even LocalSend crashes from time to time, but this application has not crashed even once so far. It has more features than Phone Link. They are also useful. Microsoft has limited many of Phone Link’s useful features to Samsung phones and certain Chinese brands. Things like storage integration (so you can access your phone’s files on your computer) or PC remote control are only available for those brands. Sefirah brings those locked features to all Android phones. You can also mirror the screen (you will need to add another open source plugin). You can make phone calls and transfer them to your computer. It also shows you call logs and SMS messages. You can also send SMS messages from your PC. While Phone Link limits storage access to photos only, Sefirah gives you full access to Android’s file storage system in Windows Explorer. Here is the complete list of its features. If you want to disable your background activity and stop the app, there is a clear option in the main menu. Verdict KDE Connect was the closest thing we had to a Phone Link alternative for a long time, but this app has changed that. The open source community has set the bar. Sefirah beats the trillion-dollar version of the tech giant in every category. Windows users will find it a pleasant to use and less intrusive version of the official Phone Link app.
