The mysterious feature on Android 8.1 allows users to send and receive messages on Chromebooks

Android 8.1 (just a developer preview) will include an extremely interesting feature - SMS Connect, which allows you to send and receive text messages on your computer. So, if you're using a Chromebook, you'll be excited about this feature.

The SMS Connect feature is displayed as an APK file in the developer preview version. You can try launching and setting it up using your browser. Besides, you also need to enable this feature on your Chromebook by typing " chrome: // flags " into the address bar and enabling the option Enable Multidevice features .

Set up SMS Connect on the phone

Ars Technica and Chrome Unboxed were the first to discover this new feature in the Anroid 8.1 preview for the developer, but when trying to set up on Chrome OS it didn't work. Instead, at the present time it seems to be just a placeholder function for the SMS Connect feature in the full version. However, ArsTechnica also notes that it may be a feature exclusively for Google Pixel.

Mac users can send and receive messages from the Macbook using iMessage. However, you can only iMessage other iPhone users also enabled this feature. If Chrome OS can also send and receive messages on any phone, not just Google Pixel or Android, this new feature of Google will probably be a great alternative.