New issue with unlocking my Samsung phone via phone link app on PC

As an addendum Samsung has released a whole slew of apps to try and more tightly integrate their laptops with the rest of their devices. This means that newer Intel and Qualcomm chips are usually supported (sorry AMD users).

Some of the more interesting apps being:

Quick Share

Samsung Flow

Samsung Account

SamsungPhone

While these don't fully overcome the functionality lost by Phone Link, they do make it a bit easier to stomach I guess.

So if I remember correctly when Phone Link disabled the lock screen visibility and remote Bluetooth activation of your Samsung device you could still glitch yourself to view your lock screen.

If you had Samsung Flow also connected on both your Windows device and Samsung Phone then you could ask for a connection request over Samsung Flow.

This would then send a notification asking you to accept the connection which you were meant to accept manually. But this notification was visible in your Phone Link App which if accepted remotely you could then view the lock screen in Samsung Flow.

This workaround got gutted when the type of notifications Phone Link could display were butchered.

My advice if you want remote access to your phone for calling and access purposes is get a Samsung Tablet to pair with your Samsung Phone. They have consistently added more functionality and ease of access for devices in their ecosystem.

That's not it.. that command is required if you want any remote control of the phone at all without a confirmation dialog all the time (applies to all remote software like Anydesk or Rustdesk).

Scroll up 6 posts or so, there I posted the phone unlock script via ADB..

The function was removed because MS insists on supporting iphones for no particular reason and the app would've been kicked off the Apple store if it supported remote unlock. This function is gone for good and will never return until maybe MS revives the Windows phone (lol, imagine that)..

On Android there's a relatively simple one-click workaround to remotely unlock the phone via ADB (less simple without a USB connection but still possible). You can find it some posts above.

There's no single app which can restore convenience after MS Phone Link removed the GUI emulation for PIN input (thanks to Tim Apple), I guess nobody cares about the niche of a dozen people who want to remote into their own phone. Rustdesk or Teamviewer can get to the blind PIN screen quite easily, but not when the phone was locked for a minute. Phone Link actually stays awake even when the phone is asleep (latest version on the phone and on Windows 11 as of today, S22 Ultra, Android 14, One UI 6.0) because you can always access messages, photos etc. without waking it up. But it can't nudge the phone out of the sleep mode - however MyPhoneExplorer can (that's a better version of Phone Link which supports file transfer over Wifi). So you can wake the phone up with MPE and hope the remote control's service comes back top life...

A more viable method is remote unlock over ADB - you can send some simple commands to wake up the phone and send the PIN as key inputs. If your phone supports wireless debugging, you don't need a USB connection and just run a simple batch script to unlock the phone and then connect with Phone Link or any other remote software. I think it has to be reenabled after reboot though. Of course you have to give your remote app projecting permissions (for Phone Link: ./adb shell appops set com.microsoft.appmanager PROJECT_MEDIA allow) but that's trivial. Teamviewer paid Samsung an ungodly amount of money to circumvent the projection permission via Knox (there's some trivia for you), but it still can't show a "secure" screen or keep the host service alive when the phone goes to sleep.

Getting ADB to work should be very simple - enable developer options and USB debugging and use the latest platform_tools from google. On first connect you'll get a popup on the phone where you have to whitelist your PC. What does it say when you type in "adb devices"?