How to Use Pushbullet to Bridge the Gap Between All Your Devices

Pushbullet, the service that acts as a bridge between your mobile and desktop OSes, sets the gold standard for developer updates. If you haven't used it recently (or ever), this is a great time to check out all the cool stuff it can do.

The Basics: Push Anything to Any Device

How to Use Pushbullet to Bridge the Gap Between All Your Devices

Way back in the day, Google introduced a Chrome extension called Chrome to Phone that would allow you to push links from your desktop to your phone with a single click. It worked okay. Pushbullet, on the other hand, picked up where that extension left off, allowing users to push text, links, files, maps and more. Not only could you push from your desktop to the phone, but you could also push data in the reverse direction: from your phone to your computer. Or from one device to many others. Or even from your device to a friends! We'll explain how to do all of those (and much more) but first you'll need the apps or the extensions. Here are download links for various platforms:

Pushbullet also utilizes Chrome's rich notification system to show you notifications that have been mirrored from your device (more on that later) or sent from the Pushbullet app to your browser. Firefox has a similar toast notification function, though it's slightly less robust (for example, Chrome allows you to dismiss a notification on your phone from the desktop, while Firefox does not).

From any of these apps or extensions, you can send something to any of the others. Here are the basics that have been around in Pushbullet for a while:

  • Send links between devices: From your desktop, using the Chrome or Firefox extension, you can send a link to your phone or tablet with the click of a button. If you're on the page you need to send, Pushbullet will automatically fill in the title and link, so you just have to pick the device and hit push.
  • Copy files to other devices: Pushbullet can copy files from one device to another, including pictures, videos, music files, PDFs, APKs, and just about anything else that you can copy. While Dropbox is a pretty good solution for some file movement, being able to push a file directly from one device to another without a middleman can be useful.
  • Open an address in your maps app: One of the sucky things about Chrome to Phone getting abandoned is that moving a Maps location from your desktop to your phone is a little harder. If you're in Maps on the desktop, you can send a link from where you're at. You can also send an address without opening up Maps at all with the address function. Both options open directly in the Maps app on Android. iOS requires you to open the address in the Pushbullet app first, but then it will jump to your maps application.
  • Push a link to someone else's phone: While you'll have to add them as a contact in Pushbullet first, you can send pushes to a friend's phone by simply changing the target device. If you've ever had to open a messaging or email app just to share a link with someone, you can immediately see how much nicer this is.

Pushing links from one place to another is just the start, though. Pushbullet aims to be the glue that holds your devices together, filling in the gaps where typical syncing software fails.

Send and Receive Text Messages on Your Computer

How to Use Pushbullet to Bridge the Gap Between All Your Devices

As any Google Voice user could tell you, sending text messages from your desktop is way easier than tapping it out on a phone. While services like MightyText exist solely for this purpose, Pushbullet rolls it into the rest of its software suite. With the feature enabled, you can get a desktop notification when you receive an SMS, reply from the pop-up, or even initiate an SMS conversation yourself.

There are a couple downsides to this, though: for starters, iPhone users don't seem to have this functionality yet (possibly due to restrictions on iOS). And MMS and group messages don't seem to be supported at all, though the developer says he hopes to add it. Nonetheless, simple SMS is still plenty useful.

Receive and Dismiss Notifications on Your Phone or Tablet from Desktop

How to Use Pushbullet to Bridge the Gap Between All Your Devices

One of the neatest features of Pushbullet on Android is that it can mirror your notifications on your desktop. You can do this en masse or on a per app basis. The app accomplishes this by using the notification listening service (which is why it doesn't work on iOS, unfortunately). Enable notification mirroring on your Android phone or tablet and then install the Pushbullet extension on Chrome or Firefox. From then on, any notification you get will show up on your desktop. You can even dismiss them from your phone, which makes it particularly handy for managing all the notifications that build up during the day.

Of course, all of this functionality is built right in. You didn't come here for the stuff you already knew you could do, did you? Let's get to the fun stuff.

Sync Your Clipboard Across All Devices

How to Use Pushbullet to Bridge the Gap Between All Your Devices

Pushbullet already helps make it easier to copy a bit of text from one device to another with the push of a note. However, syncing your clipboard could make it even easier. So they made it happen. To turn on universal copy and paste, go into Settings on the devices you want to sync and check the box to turn it on. This option is device-specific and not account-wide, so you can enable it on just your phone and desktop if, for example, you don't want a tablet interfering.

Once the feature is turned on, you'll never actually "see" it in action, but it works behind the scenes. In our tests, there was a couple seconds of lag compared to normal cut and paste (it is traveling over the internet after all), but your clipboard contents are simply replaced with whatever the last thing you copied on any device was. A warning though: this can cause some security issues if you're using it on a shared device, so be sure that you only enable it on trusted devices. Alternatively, don't copy your passwords or credit card info to the clipboard.

Subscribe to Cool Content with Pushbullet Channels

How to Use Pushbullet to Bridge the Gap Between All Your Devices

In the first section, we talked about how you can send or receive links from someone else's phone. Well, it's not just people you know that can push stuff to your phone. Pushbullet also has its own Channels you can subscribe to that will send you updates. These are a bit like custom RSS feeds, but instead of being consolidated in a reader app, they go straight to your notification shade.

Unfortunately, at the moment, it doesn't seem that you can create your own channels. However, there are several useful ones to choose from. You can get updates on Steam deals, CyanogenMod announcements, or even certain webcomics like The Oatmeal. In the latter case, any fan can tell you that updates are irregular, so getting a notification is especially handy.

Suppose you'd like to get notifications of something not on the list, though. Well, Pushbullet can help with that, too.

Create Pushbullet Recipes with IFTTT

How to Use Pushbullet to Bridge the Gap Between All Your Devices

The IFTTT channel for Pushbullet has already been populated with hundreds of recipes that allow the service to send notifications directly to your phone, tablet, or PC when certain criteria are met. You can browse the entire channel here.

This section actually has a bit of overlap with a similar service, Pushover, which we've covered before. While both services can send notifications to your device via IFTTT, Pushbullet excels by making it easier to send thing between devices manually, as well as having Tasker integration which we'll get to next. If you're more inclined to write your own code, however, Pushover might be worth your attention. That being said, here are some examples of what you can do with Pushbullet and IFTTT.

Get Notified of Stock Prices

The stock channel on IFTTT allows you to find out if a particular stock has dropped or risen by more than a set percent, or simply to check in at the end of the trading day. Data for stock trading is provided by Yahoo! Finance.

Find Out When a Package Changes Status

If you're like me, then any time you're expecting a package, you're constantly refreshing Fedex's website like a mad man, anyway. Instead, you can have IFTTT send a notification directly to your phone any time your package changes status. For now, it seems the shipping channel can't filter out any status except "delivered" (which is the only one we care about), but it's still helpful.

Push a Voice Message to Other Devices

IFTTT allows you to call in to a dedicated number and leave a voice message for yourself (or others!). With the Pushbullet channel, you can send that voice message directly to your tablet or desktop. The notification will include an audio file of the recording that you can download to any of your devices.

Find Out When the Weather is Crappy

Okay, you probably have somewhere in the area of hundreds of apps on your phone that can retrieve the weather. However, Pushbullet and IFTTT can send weather alerts directly to your phone or desktop. You can get a daily reminder of tomorrow's forecast, receive a notification if it's going to rain tomorrow, or just get today's weather report every morning.

Get Notified When Google Services Go Down

For some of us, we find out that Google services go down because our Twitter feeds won't shut up about it. If you're not quite that addicted to information overload, you can find out when a service is having a problem (or when it comes back) with the Google app status RSS feed. To make it even easier, you can have IFTTT send Pushbullet a notification every time the app status feed updates.

Use Pushbullet and Tasker Together

IFTTT isn't the only automation service that's gotten the Pushbullet treatment. About a month back, Tasker got Pushbullet support, which means that you can trigger notifications based on any profile your phone can run. Moreover, those notifications can go to any device. This means that Pushbullet notifications are about as flexible as Tasker itself, but here are a few examples of things you can do with Tasker:

Unfortunately, Tasker's ability to execute commands when it receives a Pushbullet notification seem to be broken right now, however if this is ever fixed, you would also be able to execute Tasker actions remotely by sending notifications with a specific name attached.

Pushbullet may seem like just a notification service, but with IFTTT and Tasker support, as well as extensions for two of our favorite desktop browsers, it packs a serious punch. The Pushbullet recipe page has been steadily growing since launch (more than 20 new recipes have shown up just while writing this article), so be sure to check them out.