SMS notifications are coming to Chromebooks soon as it was recently discovered by a Samsung Chromebook Plus user that a new toggle option was found within the settings menu of the device, which was also listed under a new menu category called Connected Devices. The one and only toggle under this category was listed as SMS Connect, which when turned on would allow SMS notifications to be sent to your Chromebook so you can see what they are without having to pick up and look at your smartphone. That seems like it would be a pretty nifty feature for Chromebook users.
At the moment the option is reported as not working even after flipping the switch on the toggle. So the unfortunate news for anyone who is hoping to find this option under their own settings menu or for those who have seen it but previously paid it no mind, is that turning this option on currently does nothing, and it’s reported that even after enabling it, backing out of the settings menu and then re-entering reveals that the toggles disables itself, which is an indication that Google may simply be laying the groundwork for the SMS notifications but is not yet ready to push it out to users as a fully fledged available feature.
When it comes to Chromebooks there is no indication if something like this would be limited to just a certain list of devices, just as Google has done with the support for Android Apps on Chromebooks. That being said, this seems like something that should be fairly universal and model agnostic, meaning it shouldn’t matter which Chromebook people have and it would likely work across all Chromebooks. It’s also suggested that to get SMS notifications to actually deliver to a Chrome OS machine Google might implement the use of Google Assistant, which is due to land on Chromebooks in the future. This is just speculation so far, with no official detail as to what Google’s plans are at the moment for SMS notifications and how they will work or how they will be pushed to Chrome OS devices. It’s also worth noting that this isn’t something that is showing up for people on the stable version of Chrome OS, rather it’s an option that is only showing up after enabling a flag when the device is booted into the Dev Channel.