‘Easy Unlock’ feature could soon come to Chrome OS, automatically unlocks your Chromebook if your phone is nearby

Android Police has spotted a new feature in the Chrome OS dev channel that could one day allow users to unlock devices running Chrome OS by simply having their phone near the computer. The feature, which is still in a very early beta, is dubbed “Easy Unlock.” With this feature, your Chromebook could sense when your phone is nearby and Easy Unlock would automatically unlock the Chromebook, preventing the need to enter your password.

Within the Chrome OS dev channel, the feature is disabled by default, but you can enable it by going to chrome://flags/#enable-easy-unlock. After rebooting, a new notification will appear asking if you would like to enable Easy Unlock. Unfortunately, that’s where it all comes to an end. After clicking the setup button, you’re taken to a screen, with three pages, that looks like it is searching for your device. But it just keeps searching and never finds anything and trying to swipe to the next page doesn’t do anything.

The feature also appears in the Chrome browser dev channel, but after clicking the setup button, you’re presented with the same non-functional window.

Easy Unlock appears to be very similar to the Knock app on Mac OS X, which senses when your iPhone is nearby and can automatically unlock your Mac. Given that Easy Unlock is still non-functioning, we have a long wait ahead of us before a stable release. But the concept alone is very cool.