Tom Warren is a senior editor and author of Notepad, who has been covering all things Microsoft, PC, and tech for over 20 years.
Microsoft is working on a new “Cross Device Resume” feature for Windows 11 that works similarly to Apple’s Handoff feature in macOS. The feature was spotted in a Microsoft Build 2025 session, before Windows Central noticed Microsoft editing out the demo that showed a mobile Spotify session resuming on a PC.
“When you open the app on your mobile device or tablet, Windows can show a subtle badge right on your app’s taskbar icon,” explains Aakash Varshney, a senior product manager for cross devices and experiences at Microsoft, in a “Create Seamless Cross-Device Experiences with Windows for your app” Build session for developers. “It’s a visual nudge that when clicked launches your app directly into the task, delivering a smooth intuitive handoff from PC to phone.”
Varshney’s now-deleted demo shows a Spotify app icon with a badge on it in the taskbar, and a message when you hover over the badge that says “resume, recently opened on your mobile device.” It’s designed to let you resume the Spotify app on PC right from where you left off on mobile. “Spotify launches and I’m instantly back in the same song, now playing on my PC,” says Varshney. “No need to search or start over, it’s a smooth one-click transition that keeps the music and user experience uninterrupted.”
Microsoft first started testing an app handoff feature in Windows 10, back in 2016. Codenamed Project Rome, the cross-device experience for apps was designed for developers to write apps that can “run on multiple devices and travel with the user as they switch between devices.” We’ve not seen much adoption of Project Rome in reality though, so hopefully this new Cross Device Resume is more widely adopted.
Tom Warren
Read More