Every few months someone announces that Pushbullet is dead. It is not. As of August 2026 you can open pushbullet.com, sign in, and use it. If you have used it recently you already know this, which is why the "Pushbullet is gone" posts tend to bounce off the people actually looking for help.
What happened is narrower and more useful to understand.
What actually broke
Chrome retired Manifest V2, the extension platform its browser extension was built on. The official Pushbullet extension was never rebuilt for Manifest V3, so Chromium browsers — Chrome and Edge among them — now disable it. Nothing was shut off at Pushbullet's end. The browser moved and the extension did not follow.
For most desktop users the extension was Pushbullet. Notification mirroring and the send-to-device box lived there. Lose the extension and what remains is a website and a desktop client, which is a meaningfully smaller product than the one people remember.
Community-maintained forks exist that rebuild the extension against Manifest V3, and they work. They are also third-party rebuilds of a client for a service whose own team has not shipped in years, which is a reasonable thing to be uneasy about before you hand one an API key.
Checked August 2026. Pushbullet's site is live and the service responds. Its blog's most recent post is from October 2022. The Chrome extension is not Manifest V3 and is disabled on current Chromium browsers; the Firefox add-on and the Windows desktop client are reported to still work. We have not been able to verify current pricing or free-tier limits — the site renders entirely client-side and the figures quoted around the web are close to a decade old — so we have not repeated any here.
What people actually wanted from it
Strip away the feature list and most Pushbullet usage was one motion: text exists here, text needs to be over there, now, without ceremony. A URL from a terminal. An address. An error message you want on the big screen so you can read it properly.
That motion does not need an account, a daemon, or a paired device list. It needs a channel that both screens can reach. Pushbullet built a very good version of it and then stopped maintaining the part that most people touched.
Why most replacements put the friction back
The usual suggestions re-introduce exactly what made the original appealing to avoid. Install on both ends. Create an account. Pair the devices. Keep both on the same network, or in the same ecosystem, or awake at the same time. Each is defensible on its own and collectively they rebuild the setup cost.
Emailing or messaging yourself avoids the install and pays for it differently: the text is transient but the inbox is permanent, so you either clean up after yourself or you accumulate.
The link method
Open sharenotes.dev on the first device, paste, hit Share. You get a
link made of words — sharenotes.dev/blue-fox-42. Open or retype that on the
second device and the text is there.
The URL being short enough to retype by hand is the part that matters here. There is no channel between the devices at all. You read the link off one screen and type it into the other, so it works when they share no account, no network and no ecosystem — an iPhone and a Windows desktop, or your laptop and a machine you are SSHed into from somewhere else.
The note stays live after that. Edit it on either device and the other updates, which is useful when you are reformatting something on the laptop while reading the original off the phone.
The room-code method
If text is going back and forth repeatedly, minting a new link each time is its own
friction. Clipboard rooms cover that: go to
sharenotes.dev/clip on both devices, type the same code, and you share a
live buffer.
Generated codes are six characters from a 31-character alphabet with the ambiguous
glyphs removed — no l against 1, no O against
0 — because these get read aloud and typed by hand. You can also pick your
own, any 3–10 characters.
There is no separate room system underneath. The room code is the note slug, so a room is just a note you reach by typing instead of clicking. We wrote up why we built it that way.
Two things to know before using a room for anything sensitive. Unlisted is not private — anyone who types your code lands in your room, so short or guessable codes are genuinely guessable. And because rooms are created on join, a typo does not throw an error; it silently drops you into a different empty room. If your text has not appeared, check the code before you re-paste.
Where Pushbullet is still the better pick
This is not a like-for-like swap, and pretending otherwise would waste your time.
| Pushbullet | ShareNotes | |
|---|---|---|
| Notification mirroring | Yes | No |
| File transfer | Yes | No — text only |
| SMS from desktop | Yes | No |
| Push to a device | Yes | No — you open a link or code |
| Install required | App or extension | None |
| Account required | Yes | No |
ShareNotes is pull-based and text-only. Nothing arrives on your device by itself; you go and fetch it with a link or a room code. If notification mirroring or file transfer is what you relied on, keep using something that does those — a working fork, or one of the device-sync tools built for it.
If what you relied on was moving text between screens without installing anything, that part needs no app at all, and never really did.
It expires, and that is deliberate
A note is removed 7 days after it was last opened. You can shorten that to 1 hour or 24 hours, or make it single-use so it is destroyed on first read.
That reads like a limitation and is closer to the point. The text was transient — a wifi password, an address, a paragraph in motion between two screens. Email and chat treat it as permanent because that is what they are for. Here the default is that it cleans itself up, and anything worth keeping you keep somewhere you chose on purpose.
There is a feature page for the general case at Pushbullet alternative, and a broader walkthrough at transferring text between devices.
Otherwise: open the editor, paste, and read the link off your screen.