Can't disable Phone Link from starting automatically

Hi John,

Lynnxie here,

Sorry, I was trying to post my answer last night, but I can't seem to post any sort of reply to my own post or to the answers to it. The buttons just get disabled after I hit submit and nothing else happens, even after hours of waiting. I decided to bring in a second account to see if I can reply with that. Here is what I wrote last night:

I'm not really sure if the app ever worked properly, I just noticed that it keeps running recently because my phone was trying to connect by itself. And yes, I do use the app sometimes.

I performed the clean boot, and found a pretty interesting result. Good news is that Phone Link didn't have any running processes after the restart. The bad news is that task manager now shows YourPhone.exe running with 3 processes. Which is interesting since if I'm not wrong that's the old version of Phone Link.

Booting up normally again brought back the running Phone Link processes, but not the Your Phone ones.

is there any update on this issue? i have the same problem and it's annoying

Looks like there currently is no way to disable this. It starts up regardless of settings.

Edit (this appears to have worked for me):

Settings->apps->apps&features, scroll down to "phone link", click the 3 dots->Advanced Options, Select never for "let this app run in the background". I then rebooted and it disappeared.

I'd assume with Windows Updates this will eventually reset and come back. MS really should have a way to uninstall some of these built in apps nobody wants/needs.

Looks like there currently is no way to disable this. It starts up regardless of settings.

Edit (this appears to have worked for me):

Settings->apps->apps&features, scroll down to "phone link", click the 3 dots->Advanced Options, Select never for "let this app run in the background". I then rebooted and it disappeared.

I'd assume with Windows Updates this will eventually reset and come back. MS really should have a way to uninstall some of these built in apps nobody wants/needs.

thank for that! i'll give it a try

Well I tried this and it seems to have work.

However, your setting might look different than Doug's. I don't see "Never" selectable for "let this app run in the background". Instead I see under App Permissions -> Background apps and you can switch it off here.

I've had the problem that though I have set the app settings to not start with windows the app has started. Also, every time I've shut the app down using the tray icon, some time later I notice it's back on again, since it's been popping up notifications in the middle of my doing screen recordings. I now turned the apps ability to run in the background off as a workaround found here in the comments.

Please observe that this is a bug and a workaround, not a solution to the problem! Most of the time I want the app to run, this includes in the background, but I also want to be able to turn it off! If this does not help I will have to uninstall this very promising app since I'm doing a log of recordings at the moment.

Thanks a million!!

/Sofia

FYI It started again, even though it's not allowed in the backgroung and is set not to start with windows. Crazy annoying. Sad to have to uninstall. Let's hope you fix the app.

Well, this was a twist. I can't even uninstall it!! I'll have to check the phone end then. Seriously!!!