The best Windows features aren’t made by Microsoft, and that’s the problem

As someone who has been lucky enough to have hands-on with many Windows laptops over the years for the purposes of review, I've grown accustomed to the creature comforts that each brand brings to the table for their specific ecosystem. They all have their own specific flair, and recently, when I was reviewing the Lenovo Yoga 9i, I used several of their "Aura Edition" features that Windows doesn't come with stock.

This meant things like tapping to pair Bluetooth accessories like the Yoga PC Edition headphones or tapping my phone on the side of the display to quickly share a photo, and in the midst of using these features, I realized that some of the best integrations Windows has at its disposal have nothing to do with Microsoft at all. OEMs are consistently putting forward useful features into their tech and shoehorning them into Windows, when really, it would benefit everyone to have them more closely integrated with the OS.

About this article: XDA was sent a sample of the Lenovo Headphone Yoga PC Edition along with the Yoga 9i. The company had no input into the contents of this article

Lenovo is a good example of vendor software

They have integrated their own accessories well

Tap to Pair is one piece of Smart Share, a set of features Lenovo ships on its Aura Edition laptops. You switch it on during Windows setup or in the Smart Share app, and after that, you tap a supported pair of earphones, a headset, or a mouse twice against the left or right edge of the display. A prompt pops up, you confirm it with another double tap or a click, and the accessory is connected. This is a far better connection experience than stock Windows. Tap to Launch does the same thing for phones: press F11 to open Lenovo’s Smart Connect app, tap a paired phone against the edge of the screen, and its gallery opens on the laptop so you can drag photos across.

On a laptop that was purpose built for this, it feels tightly integrated. Using Lenovo's Yoga headphones was just as simple and frictionless as opening a new set of AirPods and connecting them to a Mac.

Windows OEMs keep building their own ecosystems

Lenovo isn't alone here

Lenovo isn’t the only one doing this. Samsung’s Galaxy Book laptops ship with Multi Control, which lets a single keyboard and touchpad drive a Galaxy Book, a Galaxy Tab, and a Galaxy phone, along with Quick Share for moving files between them. Asus, HP, Dell, and most other OEMs have these kinds of creature comforts, but they're not all 1:1. They are the kind of thing that differentiates one Windows machine from the one next to it at a big box store, and all of that experimentation and feature competition can be a good thing—it's just not being taken advantage of.

Vendor ecosystems come with a cost

Sometimes they feel like bloat

The Yoga Pen feels great to use, and the Yoga PC headphones sound excellent thanks to Lenovo's collaboration with Bose, but there have been times when using these accessories that I wished that extra software wasn't required to get the most out of them. Both will pair and be fully functional without Lenovo's software installed, but to get all the bells and whistles like Smart Share and Aura Smart Modes, it needs to be installed and running.

Unfortunately, these apps are seen as an opportunity for ad placement and pop-ups about other services like McAfee, which is supremely annoying. Lenovo isn't the worst offender here, and other OEMs are just as culpable for this kind of thing, but if I have your application installed to get more utility out of the other device that has your brand on it, fewer pop-ups about your new mouse would be great.

These features are also naturally fragmented, but sometimes this is intentional. Tap to Pair is limited to Aura Edition models and supported accessories, and if you were to buy another set of headphones or a different laptop from a different OEM, you're looking at a completely different set of features.

Microsoft knows what to do to fix this

They're just slow to do it

This feature fragmentation is one of the worst things about mixing-and-matching devices in a Windows ecosystem, but Windows does have a track record of providing solutions, just not very quickly.

Swift Pair, introduced in Windows 10 version 1803, shows a connection prompt when a compatible accessory nearby enters pairing mode, which is akin to Tap to Pair. Another example is Cross-Device Resume, which lets you pick up tasks from certain Android phones on your PC. Microsoft has built pieces of this, but when OEMs are building their own pairing systems instead of leaning on what's already there, that's a problem.

Microsoft has solved this kind of problem before, specifically with Precision Touchpad, which replaced a patchwork of manufacturer touchpad drivers with an input stack Windows controls. Windows Hello is another good example, and it gave fingerprint readers and IR cameras from every OEM one consistent sign-in experience. In both cases, OEMs already had the hardware, and the experience got better once Windows owned it.

Things like Tap to Pair deserve the same treatment. Extend Swift Pair with a tap trigger, let OEMs supply the sensing, and have Windows own the prompt. Accessory makers would implement one standard that works across every brand’s laptops, and better yet, the feature would survive a clean install because it would be part of Windows itself.

The features OEMs produce are great, but I'd rather have them tightly integrated without software

Microsoft’s partners are doing its R&D for free, and they’re absorbing the bloat criticism while they do it. Tapping a pair of headphones against a laptop to connect them is the kind of thing that should make people choose Windows over Linux. Right now, it’s an underrated feature on a handful of premium laptops.