Intel Unison

~ the obit ~

Intel announced Unison at its Innovation event on 27 September 2022. It paired a phone with a Windows PC and then let the PC do the phone's work: calls and text messages on the desktop, photos moving across without a cable. Windows had its own version of this in Phone Link, and the reason anyone cared about Intel's was that Unison worked with an iPhone at a time when Microsoft's did not.

It was good. Users rated it 4.6 on the Microsoft Store against 3.9 for Phone Link, which is an unusual scoreline for a chip company's side project against the platform owner's own feature. The Windows client shipped in nineteen interface languages, Turkish among them, which is more localization effort than most bundled utilities ever get.

Intel did not build the core of it. The company bought Screenovate, an Israeli startup, at the end of 2021 in a deal reported at around 100 million dollars, and Unison is what that technology became under an Intel badge. The same engine had been licensed out before, to Dell, where it ran as Dell Mobile Connect.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

Unison arrived the way OEM software usually arrives, preinstalled on a laptop somebody bought for other reasons. It was tied to Intel's Evo program and to the 12th and 13th generation machines, so you got it with a Lenovo or an HP rather than going to find it. That distribution was also the ceiling: a phone-link app from a chip vendor cannot follow you to your next computer if the next computer has a different badge on it.

By late 2024 the same technology had been rebuilt for Lenovo's Aura Edition laptops under the Smart Share name, with Lenovo's branding on it instead of Intel's.

~ the sunset notice ~

In early April 2025 the app itself started telling people. The pop-up read: "It was a great run, but Intel Unison is approaching its sunset at the end of June 2025. Please take it into account as you consider other multi-device experience alternatives." The Microsoft Store listing was more corporate about it, describing a wind-down whose first step was ending service for most platforms at the end of June, with Lenovo Aura platforms keeping the service through the rest of 2025. HP told its customers the version that matters: discontinued effective 30 June 2025, after which the service would no longer be available.

Intel said nothing on its own Unison page, which stayed up and cheerful while the apps were announcing their own deaths. The context was Intel's worst stretch in decades, with more than fifteen thousand jobs cut in 2024 and anything that was not silicon under review. Today the Google Play listing for com.intel.unison returns a 404 and the suggested replacement is Microsoft's Phone Link, which by then had learned to talk to iPhones.

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