Google Chrome Gets a Shared Clipboard for Android and PC

Google Chrome commanding nearly 70 percent of the desktop browser market gives the Mountain View-based search giant the opportunity to build very exciting features that expand the application beyond its standard purpose.

In other words, because it has so many users, Google Chrome can help bring together two worlds, the ones of desktops and mobile devices.

And the first step in this direction appears to be a shared clipboard that allows users to copy on one device and paste on another, all using nothing more than Google Chrome.

The first time I wrote about the shared clipboard was earlier this year when Google started the work on this feature and added some experimental flags to the Canary build of the browser. At that time, however, the feature wasn’t yet working, and this made its future rather uncertain.

The Shared Clipboard is alive

More recently, however, Google Chrome Canary 79 was updated with this shared clipboard, and the guys over at XDA discovered that you can enable it with three different flags:

Enable receiver device to handle shared clipboard feature

Enable shared clipboard feature signals to be handled

Sync Clipboard Service

Once the shared clipboard is enabled, selecting content and right-clicking it should bring up a new option in the context menu that reads “Send text to device.” Doing this generates a notification on the smartphone revealing that new text has been added to the clipboard, and you can then paste it normally in any text field.

For now, everything seems to be working quite smoothly, and if nothing major happens in the meantime, it could be part of the very next stable release of Google Chrome.

Needless to say, the search company hasn’t announced this feature yet, but given everything is working so smoothly, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it going live rather sooner than later.