By design, Google tightly integrates its services with Android and even Chrome OS. Deep integration results in features like OS-agnostic sync and other conveniences, which make it very easy to switch between your devices signed in to the same Google account. Click-to-call was one such feature inGoogle Chrome, but it was quietly disabled and hidden behind a flag in Chrome 113, much to the user’s dismay. With theChrome 116 stable update, though, Google has nuked the feature completely, and there is no suitable replacement in sight.
Click-to-call was a boon for Chrome users on desktop, who had one or more linked Android phones — a number that could be in the billions. The feature allowed you to click on a phone number on your computer, select a linked Android phone, and call the number without manually using the dialer. In May this year, Chrome 113 disabled the feature by default and moved it behind the following Chrome flag which one could use to re-enable click-to-call.
chrome://flags/#click-to-call
Android Police founder Artem Russakovskii notes that the above flag has disappeared without a trace in the Chrome 116 stable update. Distraught users have flooded the comments section of a recentChromium bug report, requesting Google to reinstate the feature. The company says the feature was axed due to low usage, but some users say they used it around 200 times per day. Moreover, the company never informed Chrome users about the upcoming deprecation, effectively breaking cross-platform calling between ChromeOS, desktop, and Android phones.
Google’s new iPhone-likecall switching featurespotted earlier this month could be seen as the closest replacement, but it is still in development. It allows switching calls from one Android phone to another, but disappointingly leaves ChromeOS and Chrome users on a desktop out of the loop. So, people using the browser are now dependent on untested third-party extensions which may not work as smoothly. By removing click-to-call from Chrome, Google took a mistimed step backwards, because there’s no drop-in replacement we could recommend right now.
Users invested in the Android and Google ecosystem probably feel betrayed by click-to-call joining theGoogle graveyard, but the best solution right now comes at the cost of security. You could run Chrome 113 on desktop and retain the flag that controlled the click-to-call after turning off automatic updates. However, we cannot speak for its reliability or longevity.
