If you're using MacOS as your desktop, you don't need Pushbullet, because iMessage can remote control your iPhone for sending and receiving SMS messages. You can also make and receive phone calls via Facetime too.

Add to that things like universal copy/paste or the ability to quickly resume some activity from your phone, like opening the active web page, or the usually seamless mirroring of your screen via Airplay, etc.

It does lock you into Apple's ecosystem but the experience is much better than Pushbullet, or anything else.

Yes I did use Pushbullet when I was an Android user. I was one of their first users. I don't miss it.

I stopped using Pushbullet even before I moved to iPhone b/c it's a potential privacy leak and security problem. It's bad enough that we have to trust the phone maker, with something like Pushbullet you give all control of your phone to a third party. Yes they claim the ability to do e2e encryption, but talk is cheap and I've never heard of an independent audit.

If you were using an Android device frequently I'd say it's worth it at the current price, I actually cancelled it a few months ago trying to save money and lasted about a half hour before I reactivated. When I first installed it they had it (they might still) so you could have a free tier for a small amount of SMS messages. I used it for 3 or 4 and then paid for it right then. My only other option at the time was to use Hangouts (gross). My Chromebox has had Google Messenger support for quite some time now but I don't want to use Messenger on my phone as I prefer Textra.

Aside from using it for SMS via my Chromebox (or less frequently my Win10 lapto, Chromebox is my daily driver) at my desk I also:

- use it to quickly send someone a photo from reddit/imgur just by saving it and attaching it instead of firing off the link (so I know they actually look at it)

- Use it to send YouTube videos and pages from my phone to my browser at home and it just opens it in a new tab there. I actually use this several times a week for when it's something I want to give my attention to but am out and about doing something.

- To mirror phone notifications in my Chromebox/laptop browser. You can select individual apps to do this. I mostly just use this to quickly scan messages if I'm watching something on YouTube or in a Reddit thread.

It also works fine with Grammarly on my Chromebox (Dunno about the Win10 machine) which isn't a big deal but I like getting anything I type on that machine counted in my weekly Grammarly stats because I'm a nerd.

My only complaint is sometimes SMS will just hang sending from your browser, if you unlock your phone they then send. I imagine I could fix this by changing the appropriate power saving features in Android but it's not a big deal, just a half second finger swipe on my phone.

It can be insignificantly buggy sometimes, it'll be blank in Chrome but maybe 90% of the time if I just click out of it and then click back into it, voila. The other 10% of the time switching tabs corrects it. That could just be my Chromebox though, I've never see it do it in Win10.

Have you looked at alternatives to Pushbullet?

Every time I've started investigating I've gotten mired in researching the various options and given up without trying anything.

Nope. It was the first thing I found and it works so there's no need for me to replace it.