Push Links from an Android Device to the Chrome Browser with android2cloud

Productivity Sauce

While the built-in browser on your Android device lets you bookmark interesting and useful links, you'd usually want to save them on a Web-based service rather than storing them on the mobile device. There are several utilities that can help you with that. InstaFetch, for example, lets you bookmark the currently viewed Web page on the Instapaper service, and there is a plethora of utilities that can bookmark pages on your Delicious account.

But what if you want to push links directly from your Android device to a desktop browser? android2cloud is a nifty open source solution that allows you to do just that. Using it, you can push links from your Android device directly to the Google Chrome browser. android2cloud consists of two parts: a tiny Android app (search for android2cloud on the App Market) and a Google Chrome extension. Once you've installed the android2cloud app on your Android device, launch it and create an account. To push a link, enter it in the URL field and press Send. Besides that, you can use the app directly within the built-in browser.

When you want to push the link of the currently viewed Web page, press the Menu hardware button on your device, tap on the More button, select the Share page item, and select android2cloud. This launches the android2cloud app and automatically inserts the link into the URL field. To receive the pushed link in Chrome, install the extension and grant it access when prompted. Once you've done that, the pushed link magically opens in a new tab. By the way, you don't have to keep the browser opened in order to receive the links, but keep in mind that when you launch Chrome, it will open only the latest link you pushed from your Android device. In other words, if you want to push multiple links, you should keep Chrome running on the receiving end.