As long as you’re signed in with the same Apple ID on your iPhone and your Mac, you’ll be able to send and receive those blue bubble iMessages from the Messages app on your computer. But to send and receive those standard green bubble SMS messages, make sure your phone’s text message forwarding feature is turned on.
- Open the Settings app and tap Messages.
- Tap the “text message forwarding” option.
- Select the Mac (or iPad) you want to send and receive text messages from.
If you have a Mac and an Android device, which isn’t as weird as it sounds, you have fewer options. The most convenient way is to use Google’s Messages app for your text messages, which many Android phones these days do by default. (If your phone doesn’t already have it, you can download it for free from the Google Play Store here.)
Once you’ve installed the app, open the web browser of your choice on your Mac, go to the Google Messages website, and follow the instructions to pair your phone and Mac by scanning the QR code on your screen. After that, you’ll see all your text conversations right in your web browser, where you can receive and reply as long as you stay connected.
The easiest option here is to use the same Google Messages feature we just discussed. That said, if your PC is running Microsoft’s Windows 10 or Windows 11 operating systems, you can use a special feature called Phone Link that does much more than send your text messages to the right people. Here’s how to set it up.
- On your Windows PC, locate the search box or button on your taskbar and type “dialup” and then sign in to your Microsoft account if prompted.
- If your Android phone doesn’t have it yet, please download and install the “Link to Windows” app. The Phone Link app on your computer will offer a link to help you find it.
- Once the app is installed on your phone, click the button that allows you to pair with the QR code in the Phone Link window on your computer, and then follow the remaining instructions.
Beyond sending and receiving messages, you can also use the Phone Link app on your PC to view your phone’s photos on your monitor, save those files to your PC, and even run certain Android apps within Windows, all without having to connect anything. .
Apps like AirMessage can essentially forward SMS and iMessages from an iPhone to whatever device you’re currently using, be it an Android phone or a Windows laptop. The capture? Usually you have to set up additional equipment and play around with the settings.
But if you have an iPhone and a PC and you really want to quickly get in touch with someone via text, you can try sending them a text message via email. You need to know three things for this to work:
- The phone number of the person you are trying to contact
- The name of the company that provides your cell phone service such as Verizon or AT&T
- The special domain names used by these companies to route incoming emails to mobile phones. For Verizon, it is vtext.com. For AT&T, it is txt.att.net. And for T-Mobile, it’s tmomail.net.
Once you have all this, you can send an email to [recipient’s phone number]@[special domain name]. Let’s say you want to communicate with a T-Mobile customer in this way; would send your (brief) message in an email to, say, [email protected].
