What just happened? Microsoft's phone mirroring service, the Your Phone app, is now an integral part of the Windows 10 experience. For those unaware, it is part of the company's efforts to enable multiple cross-device experiences, by mirroring a smartphone to the PC over Bluetooth. Since Your Phone is now deeply incorporated in the OS with more features to come in the future, it's now deemed a feature and the app itself can no longer be uninstalled.

In March, Microsoft launched a beta of its Your Phone App for Windows Insiders. The idea behind it being to increase productivity of users, preventing them from being distracted by their phones by bringing its content to their Windows PC and offer an experience similar to one enjoyed by iPhone users with macOS. The service launched with limited support for Samsung Galaxy devices with more models, including Apple's iPhone, for wider compatibility in the future.

Whether the app has gained any traction with the Windows community remains to be seen. Microsoft now considers it an important part of the Windows 10 experience and explicitly stated that the app cannot be uninstalled, as reported by BleepingComputer.

"The Your Phone app is deeply integrated into Windows to light up multiple cross-device experiences now and in the future. In order to build more of these experiences between phones, PCs, and other devices, the app can't be uninstalled."

Currently, Android users can do various tasks with the Your Phone app. These include screen mirroring, viewing notifications, replying to SMS texts and transferring photos over the phone's Bluetooth connection. iOS users on the other hand can only continue reading web pages on their PC that they have opened on the Microsoft Edge browser on their iPhone.

While the app would be useful to many, some users may still want to uninstall it, be it after a clean installation of Windows 10 or viewing Your Phone as an another unwanted app. That option is now gone, with the remaining solution to just ignore it by either unpinning the app from the Start menu and/or the taskbar as it's now considered a built-in Windows application by Microsoft.