For quite a long time now, Google Chrome has supported a feature which allows users to send a phone number from their desktop browser to their smartphone to make a call, a very convenient feature indeed. But, in the latest updates, Google has removed the feature.
“Click to Call” in Chrome allowed users to right-click on a phone number in their browser to send that call to an Android phone linked to the same account. The functionality was also available in the omnibar in some cases. Regardless of how it was accessed, though, it was a handy little feature.
Earlier this year, Google started the removal of “Click to Call” by pushing the feature behind a flag that had to be manually enabled, as documented on the Chromium bug tracker. It was a very quiet removal on Google’s part, with no formal announcement or warning within the browser.
The change to being disabled by default was first noticed in a release in May and, now, it’s gone a step further. In Chrome 116, Google has removed “Click to Call” from Chrome entirely. As Artem Russavowski highlighted on Twitter/X, the “chrome://flags/#click-to-call” flag has been removed entirely in this latest stable release, preventing users from accessing the feature entirely.
There’s been a fair amount of users asking for the feature to be revived, and it at least seems like Google is open to it. In a comment earlier today, a member of the Chromium team said a conversation will be had about “whether we can continue to support the feature.”
I hear and understand that you miss click-to-call. I’ll have a conversation with our product team about whether we can continue to support the feature. If you want to follow the bug or express that you want this feature back, please just star this bug – don’t post a new comment. I’m restricting adding comments temporarily.
Hopefully, that ends up reversing the decision.
All of that said, though, it is quite telling that it wasn’t even noticed that Google was going through with this removal until just recently. Given Google’s apparent reasoning of “low use,” we’re curious how many people actually used the feature. Have you used it? Were you using it regularly? Vote in the poll below!
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