Having a way of copying and pasting text and links across Android, iOS, and your Windows PC or tablet is something great and it's never been easier. There are numerous ways of sharing a clipboard across different operating systems, but today we will be taking a look at one of the easiest, and most importantly free, methods of doing this. For the purpose of this guide, we will be using Pushbullet and we will go over how to set it up on your mobile devices and PC.
Android
Head over to the Play Store and download the official Pushbullet – SMS on PC app. Open the app and sign in with either your Google or Facebook account, but keep in mind that you will have to use the same account on your other devices in order for this to work. We will be going with the former option for the purpose of this guide. Once you are logged in, you will then have the option of allowing Pushbullet to send notifications from your phone to your PC, which is a great feature, but entirely optional.
If you want to use it, simply tap on “Enable” and grant Pushbullet the required permissions. You can also enable texting from your PC or tablet in the next step, which is also entirely optional for what we are doing here. Once you are done, Pushbullet will be added to the share menu on your device and you will be able to send copied text or files over to any or all of your other devices.
Go to the App Store, download the official Pushbullet app and sign in with either your Google or Facebook account. You have to be signed in with the same account on all your devices, in order for this to work. Once you are done, move on to the next step and decide whether to allow Pushbullet to send you notifications or not. The app will then be added to the iOS share menu and you will be able to send copied text and files across different devices. Unfortunately, texting from a Windows PC does not work with iOS right now and iOS devices can only push notifications to Mac computers.
There are two ways of using Pushbullet on your PC – via a browser extension or a standalone app. We will take a look at both options.
Pushbullet browser extension (available for Chrome, Firefox and Opera)
We will be using Chrome, but the procedure should be identical on other browsers. Go to the Chrome Web Store and download the official Pushbullet extension. Once it has been installed, open it and sign in with the same account you are using on your other devices. Pushbullet will then be added to your context menu in Google Chrome. Note that it won't be available as a sharing option in context menus outside of Chrome. You will need the standalone Pushbullet app for this.
Pushbullet will be added to Chrome's context menus
Head over to pushbullet.com and download the client for Windows. Once it has been installed, log in with the same account you are using on your other devices, either Google or Facebook. The standalone app offers more in terms of flexibility when compared to the Chrome extension and allows for sharing copied text and files outside of Chrome.
The standalone app features a lot of options and adds Pushbullet to context menus in Windows
That's it! Now you can not only share copied text and links between all your devices, but also send files, text from your PC, if you are using an android smartphone, and much more. Pushbullet also has a PRO version which actually offers a true universal copy & paste that works instantly. In other words, if you copy a line of text on your PC, then grab your phone and long-press and select “Paste”, the copied entry will appear without going through any additional menus. You can get the PRO version via a monthly subscription of $4.99/mo, or a yearly subscription of $39.99 per year ($3.33/mo). Still, the free version of Pushbullet does a great job and might be just what you are looking for.
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