Getting a text message on your Android while you’re doing serious Windows desktop work just plain sucks. Your phone’s vibrations and chimes do a decent enough job of getting your attention, but an awful one of communicating what kind of message you’ve just received, much less its urgency.

Fortunately, there’s hope for a better future. A young and sprightly category of apps promise to fling the notifications you receive on your phone to your computer screen, and better still, let you take action on them.

Mirroring your Android phone’s notifications to a Windows computer is, as it turns out, relatively easy. There’s no shortage of apps that’ll handle that heavy work for you — some even sync files, perform backups, and share your clipboard across devices. It really comes down to a choice in service, and that choice depends largely on how deeply intertwined you prefer your phone and computer to be.

If you’d like simply to be able to view your phone’s notifications on your computer, then Pushline and Desktop Notifications are an obvious choice given neither do much beyond displaying the content of incoming alerts. But if you want to be able to reply to text messages, answer phone calls, transfer documents, and share content with nearby friends, then AirDroid, MightyText, and Pushbullet are far superior solutions. Not every feature is free, granted, but the added convenience is often worth the price of admission.