Sharing from one app to another has been a mainstay of Android for years and years. It was one of the features that first drew me to Android: no more copying and pasting, no more having to open Twitter or WhatsApp to send a picture I just saw in my Gallery. Apps could talk to each other and the experience felt more cohesive and seamless.
But with time, the Share UI in Android has languished, stuck with the same features and same problems. It switched from a vertical list to a horizontal one, it added direct share in Android 6.0 and app pinning in Android 7.0, yet these felt like putting lipstick on a pig: the Share UI remains slow, bloated, convoluted, and if you pay close attention to it, one of the most inconsistent experiences on Android to date. Android P, like Oreo before it, appears to bring no improvements to the Share interface, but that’s a big oversight in our opinion. It’s high time Google gave it the attention it deserved and fixed its many issues.
The share sheet on Android is, indeed, a mess. It’s odd how such an important aspect of one of Android’s major strong points – inter-application communication – is being left to rot.
Copy and paste is faster, even though copy paste is horrible in Android
You can share pretty much anything between apps but lot’s of things can’t be copy-pasted. Could you for ex. “copy” 3 PDFs from google drive and “paste” them in a whatsapp message, on any mobile platform?
I am not an avid whatsapp user. However I do have to email invoices, and Google drive is horrible. Stupid tech companies need to stop forcing apps on people. I send a link for Google drive and it wants to install or update their phone app. The path of least resistance is not to update Google drive for a 200kb pdf file. Things just have to work, constantly. Not be dependent on an app. A browser wi always work, will lways be there, and doesn’t take up extra space on a phone that can’t install anything because it is out of space
Edited 2018-05-06 19:35 UTC
Who actually uses share for anything and why would anyone actually want to?
Hopefully Google realizes that Share is a “feature” that really isn’t broken, and there really isn’t a reason to “fix” it, but to simply leave it alone.
I use it all the time. For ex. to email a file from my dropbox or send a photo from the google photos app to a friend on whatsapp. What would be the alternative be, you mean?
I use share all of the time, but I have Apple devices and it works fine. I can’t comment on how well it works on Android.
If I’m reading an interesting web article on my iPad or iPhone and I want to share it with my wife, I hit the share icon and click on her name. A message pops up on her screen and she clicks to accept it through AirDrop. The article appears on her screen. No email, SMS messages, cutting, pasting, etc.
Sharing is a really useful feature and Android developers should do whatever it takes to make it equal or better the iOS experience.
What if she doesn’t want to read the article there and then? What if she’s using an Android or Windows device? Seriously, that approach sounds terrible.
Go into detail as to how Android’s sharing feature is “just so, so, so much better than” that of iOS. I’d like to see your thoughts on that.
Edited 2018-05-09 16:33 UTC
I use it all the time – it’s effectively the interprocess data sharing model.
Want to send a photo to someone or something? You can do it from the app, or you can take the photo, then share it from the gallery to the app.
Want to copy a link to something to the clipboard? In a lot of cases, the easiest way to do this is (with the Google Drive app installed) use a Copy to Clipboard sharing option.
(Really that’s 99% of what I use it for – the rest is Cortana’s Send to PC to get links to my desktop to read later.)
While the article does make some good suggestions for improving sharing on Android, it’s also laughably overblown, and also relies too much on the premise that while the author can cope with all the supposed confusion, other people are just too stupid to cope with there being sometimes three and sometimes four icons in a row.
I use Android sharing pretty much every day, and while, like so much of Android, it could use some improvements, it is, like so much of Android, just so, so, so much better than what other operating systems do.
I was reading the article, and was very confused– The only thing I really “share” from my phone is the odd photo/video I’ve taken, and using QuickPic (preferred app), the share button is always at the top, and quickly brings up a list of share targets, with your most frequently used at the top, and a “.. more ..” at the bottom to select other targets.
The “standard” google share dialog (which I’ve never used before today) is hideous by comparison.
I think the only problem with the sharing UI is that there are way too many crap applications that think they are the center of the universe and obviously i want to use them for sharing, without asking me if i ever want that. Like when i share an image, i probably want SMS, Email or Facebook/Instagram. I never want to set my facebook profile image, send it through blutooth, add it to google maps, nearby share, Camera, Amazon search photo, convert to pdf, beam, twitter direct message, hangouts, flipboard, hp print service, jira, etc etc etc etc.
If it was easy to enable/disable crap on this list to make the size managable, then i think it works fine