Ask Paul: July 9 (Premium)

Happy Friday! It’s been another slog despite the short week here in the U.S., so let’s get the weekend started early with some great reader questions.
Your Phone
wolters asks:

Hey Paul. It's been a while since I heard you mention Your Phone. Do you use it on a daily basis? And if so, do you find it useful? Do you have hope it will include RCS one day? I really think is a very strong app but not having RCS forces me to fall back to Google Messages on the Web, at least for sending full sized media files.

Your Phone is one of those things that sounds great on paper and demos well, but I’ve found it to be incredibly unreliable. So I do not use Your Phone.

The thing is, I normally don’t need Your Phone for anything. There are no/few Android apps I want to run on my PC, I rarely if ever need to access photos that are on a phone because Google Photos and OneDrive exist, and everything syncs to both places immediately. The one thing I would find useful, however, is text messaging. All these years into the smartphone era, I still find typing on a tiny screen to be difficult and error-prone, and if I need to write something long, I just dictate it. Which introduces its own errors.

On a coincidental note, we have friends visiting from out of town for several days, and my wife and I had intended to put together a list of Philadelphia restaurant choices for them to choose from. We had previously discussed these with my brother-in-law, who has lived in this area for his entire life and regularly eats out in Philly because of work. Anyway, we kept forgetting to send it, and our friends were driving here Thursday (yesterday), so on Wednesday night, my wife and I finally sat down to figure out which 5 or 6 restaurants to recommend. The issue is that the restaurants were pinned in Google Maps (originally from my phone), and I wanted to text them this information. But that would be tedious to do on a phone.

So I used Google Maps on a PC to go through the list. I used Notepad to create the final list for our friends, with names and website URLs. And then I installed the Google Messages web app, which actually works reliably, and texted them from my PC.

This is a great example of using something that, for me, “just works.” We all have our own preferences, etc. I know.

And not that this affects me, but there is the whole iPhone problem with Your Phone too. Why Microsoft can’t do better for 50 percent of its market (in the US at least) is unclear, even given Apple’s limitations.
What the tech
bschnatt asks:

Since Andrew Zarian is too busy to do the What The Tech podcast, have you thought of teaming up with someone else? Brad Sams is an obvious choice, but it would be interesting to see you team up with someone less technically inclined (to get their perspective on UI, etc), or perhaps someone who thinks a lot differently than you do.

Honestly, I’m kind of podcasted out here, and the longer this break from What the...