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Dear Microsoft,

I love the idea of Your Phone.

Actually, I used to love Your Phone. The application. We should probably clear that up before this gets weird.

Can we talk about the name for a second? From where I’m sitting, it’s my phone. “My Phone” seems reasonable. Or just “Phone.” You could even go with “myPhone” and let my Apple-loving friends enjoy the argument that would follow.

But I could forgive the name. I did forgive the name.

When I first started using it, it was wonderful. I could leave my phone alone and handle so much from my computer. It became part of how I worked, which is about the nicest thing I can say about a utility: I stopped thinking about it and started depending on it.

Then, in my experience, it got less reliable.

Random disconnects. Notifications that wouldn’t arrive until I restarted the app. A tool I had happily worked into my day became another thing I needed to check.

That is a particularly frustrating failure for this kind of application. If the point is that I don’t need to keep looking at my phone, I need to trust that the connection is working. Otherwise, I’m checking the phone and checking the application that was supposed to save me from checking the phone.

We have somehow added a step.

And restarting the app shouldn’t be part of my normal notification workflow. I have other things to restart. Builds, mostly. Occasionally my enthusiasm.

What makes this annoying is that I know how useful it can be. I’ve already had the version of this experience that made me happy. Now the app feels like a reminder that I used to have a cool little tool that quietly did its job.

Meanwhile, my Apple-using friends get to look smug, and I would really appreciate it if you could stop helping them.

I’m not asking for another feature to be impressed by. I want to be able to rely on the features I already liked.

If the connection drops, make that obvious. If notifications aren’t coming through, don’t leave me assuming everything is fine. And please make recovering the connection something the software handles as reliably as possible.

I don’t know which part of the connection is responsible for what I’m seeing. I do know that “restart the app and see whether anything shows up” is wearing thin.

I want this to work. I want to recommend it. I want to leave my phone sitting somewhere else and get on with what I’m doing.

Please give me back the part where I could forget the app was there.