Google appears to be working on a free Android PC backup feature that copies your photos and videos to a Windows PC over local Wi-Fi, with no cloud storage and no subscription involved. The catch, at least going by the code as it stands today: the same discovery indicates Samsung Galaxy phones won’t be invited to the party.
The feature isn’t official and isn’t live for anyone yet. It was surfaced by Android Authority in an APK teardown of Google Play Services version 26.26.33, where the outlet activated a hidden, inactive “info” page describing how the tool would work and which devices it would support. That makes this work-in-progress code, not a shipping product — Google hasn’t announced it or commented, and, as with any teardown, it could change before release or never ship at all. GSMArena subsequently reported on the same finding.
How the Quick Share PC backup is meant to work
According to the teardown, the whole thing is built on Quick Share — Google’s nearby-sharing tool that lives inside Android via Play Services and also has a companion app for Windows. You’d start setup from the Quick Share app on your PC, with both the phone and the computer signed into the same Google Account.
After that, it runs quietly in the background. Selected photos and videos back up automatically, on a daily basis, whenever your phone and PC are both switched on, near each other, and connected to the same Wi-Fi network. A manual “back up now” button is expected too, so you’re not stuck waiting for the daily pass. Because the files move locally over Wi-Fi straight to your PC, nothing touches the cloud — and it’s free.
That’s a useful gap-filler if you’ve hit the limits of a free 15GB Google account and don’t want to pay for storage just to keep photos safe. It also isn’t the first unreleased Google feature to show up in code before any rollout — we recently saw the same with Google Messages chat themes in beta ahead of a wider launch.
Why the Android PC backup reportedly skips Samsung
Here’s the twist. The compatibility page in the teardown appears to exclude Samsung Galaxy smartphones from the feature. Word it carefully: the teardown indicates Samsung devices reportedly won’t be supported, not that Google has publicly declared as much. And since Samsung is the one brand specifically called out as unsupported, the assumption is that other Android phones are fine — though that, too, is an inference from the reporting rather than a confirmed list.
As for why, the leading theory from the coverage is that Samsung already ships its own Smart Switch app, which handles phone-to-PC backup and transfer. Notably, Smart Switch doesn’t currently do fully automatic, scheduled daily backups the way this new tool is designed to — so the exclusion may be about avoiding overlap with Samsung’s own software. That reasoning is speculation from the outlets, not a statement from either company; neither Google nor Samsung has commented.
If it holds, the practical cost falls on Galaxy owners, who would miss a free, automatic backup every other Android user gets — while being nudged toward a first-party app that, for now, doesn’t match it feature-for-feature.
When could Android PC backup arrive?
There’s no release date, no confirmation the feature ships in this form, and no word on the final supported-device list. What’s solid is the code-level evidence that it’s in development inside Play Services and that Samsung is named as excluded; everything about timing and the Smart Switch rationale is not. We’ll update this if Google says anything official.
Sources: Android Authority, GSMArena
