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Share Sheet is both the best and the worst thing that has happened to Android. Theoretically, this is a powerful built-in feature that lets you share content from one app to another and should make it easy to send photos, files, videos and links to your most valuable contacts in just two. or three clicks. The reality, however, is far from this ideal. The suggested contacts in the top row “direct sharing” rarely consist of people you talk to regularly, and far too many apps (including Google apps!)
Sharing on Android has improved in recent years, but it’s still far from ideal. Before Android 10, loading the system share sheet was a frustrating exercise. It was not cached at all, meaning that every time you called it the system had to check which apps you had installed and which ones you are most likely to share based on some clues not specified. This leads to randomly changing apps and super slow loading experience. It is likely that this unsatisfactory situation has also given rise to custom share sheets – alternative in-app sharing capabilities implemented by app developers that often mostly mirror the sharing dialogue at home. system scale.
Back then, we were already begging Google to fix the worst of issues, and the company mostly listened. Android 10 introduced the fast and responsive system share sheet as we know it today, with a top row of suggested contacts from different apps, a second row of suggested apps based on what you’re sharing, and a collection alphabetical to other targets (all other applications eligible for the content in question).
Although Share Sheet is much faster and noticeably better these days, sharing content on Android is still a frustrating experience.
Problems and possible solutions
There are two issues with the current implementation of the share menu: custom share sheets and direct share targets. Let’s dive into the first topic. Tons of apps use their own share sheets, with Google apps being among the top offenders. These custom versions offer some features that are not available in the Android system share sheet, but often come with far fewer share targets than their system pendant. There is also no consistency. Each app does things slightly differently, making it difficult to remember how to move through each menu.
Custom Share Sheets in various apps including Google apps.
In Google Photos, you can select more images to share after pressing the Share button, and it is possible to send photos to contacts in the app. Google Maps also allows you to share with in-app contacts. Google Chrome also allows you to access some cool features in its share menu, like the ability to send a tab to your other devices or generate a QR code. Twitter also has a custom share sheet with options to tag a tweet, DM to another user, or add it to a fleet. Drive and the rest of Google’s productivity suite don’t even exploit the Android share menu at all. The list could go on and on, with TikTok, Facebook, and many more, but you get the gist of it – there’s no visual consistency and actions can differ significantly depending on the app.
If you look at some of the apps on your System Share Sheet on Android 11 (or 12), you’ll notice that they have little drop-down arrows next to their names, signaling that you’ll open a menu when you tap them. Within that menu, you’ll find some of the same specific sharing options that you can sometimes spot in the app’s custom share sheet.
Left: Chrome custom share sheet. Middle and right: Chrome options in the system share menu.
This is the case for Chrome: its custom share sheet offers five options: share a screenshot, copy the current link to your clipboard, send a link to your devices, create a QR code, and print. In the system share sheet, the app always offers two of these options, printing and sending to your devices. It’s probably trivial to add the QR code functionality here, and the system share sheet already supports copying a link to your clipboard, so there’s no need to duplicate this option. You would lose the screenshot functionality, but then again you can just take a screenshot through your system. Chrome actually doesn’t need to have a built-in variant of this feature. That leaves us with the conclusion: Google Chrome could easily do without its custom share sheet (and it did happen until August 2020).
Left: Custom Maps sharing menu. Right: Mockup for card sharing options in system sheet.
Things are a bit more complicated when it comes to apps like Maps or Photos that offer sharing with built-in contacts. But here the developers could just add an entry to the system share sheet drop-down menu that offers something like “Send to your contacts.” If you’re sharing from Photos or Maps it might give you an extra step, but at least the share menu would be consistent across all apps. In any case, Twitter proves that it is possible. In addition to its custom share sheet, it has a drop-down menu in the system’s share menu that lets you choose to tweet, DM, or add to a fleet.
There might be a better option that would give us the best of both worlds, if I can suggest that. What if app developers could get an extra row in the system share sheet for some custom actions in the app?
Left: Chrome custom share menu. Middle: Android share menu. Right: Mockup with Chrome options in the Android share menu.
I’ve created a mockup of what I’m envisioning using Chrome as the example above. I added the four relevant sharing options from its custom menu to the system’s share sheet, and I think this might be the most elegant solution. App developers could keep their specialized sharing options, but users wouldn’t have to take any extra steps just to share with an app that a developer didn’t include in their custom share sheet. For Google Photos and Maps, developers can add in-app contacts as sharing targets to this row, perhaps with an extra button to show more contacts. I know these contacts might conflict with the top row contact suggestions, but maybe the in-app contacts could override the usual direct sharing suggestions instead?
Solution 3: transfer to the app
Optional transfer to avoid an in-app sharing menu in Telegram (left) and WhatsApp (middle and right).
Then there are also apps that follow a completely different path. Messengers like Telegram and WhatsApp have found an elegant solution for in-app sharing by introducing the concept of forwarding via an extra button. By pressing this transfer button, you can select exclusively a contact from WhatsApp or Telegram to transfer media or message to, but if you tap the Android share icon, the standard share sheet will appear and you can continue. and share with another app. This could also be an option for maps and photos, although I do admit that with people who used to hit the normal share button, changing that might not be a good idea at one point. UX view.
The Android system share sheet itself also needs some work. I don’t know about you, but for the record, I heard about charges people who never get relevant contacts in the first direct share line, which is pretty packed with recommendations to chat with that guy you DM DM on Twitter once in 2014 (okay, I’m exaggerating can -be here, but you get the point). Either Google needs to completely overhaul the mechanism it uses to extract these sharing targets, or delete them altogether. If you ask me, we could get rid of this direct share line altogether and use the space to introduce custom sharing options into the app, as detailed above, at least if Google doesn’t want to change anything there. algorithm that selects contacts.
Another idea for this direct sharing section is the ability to select and pin specific contacts from your favorite apps, just like you can row-pin apps under direct share targets. If I could pin my fiancée who I chat with all the time, I would be happy already.
If this sounds familiar to you, you probably own a Samsung phone. Samsung successfully addressed these issues in One UI, its custom interface on top of Android. The manufacturer allows significant changes to the system user interface through its Good Lock suite of apps, with Home Up being responsible for editing the share sheet (among other things). In it, you can decide which contacts to pin to share directly and select which apps should appear in the menu. You can also turn off direct sharing altogether.
It’s great to see this solution from Samsung, and I’m glad it exists, but I’d rather Google could take care of it on its own and make it available on all Android phones. After all, Google often takes features from manufacturers and adds them to the underlying system for anyone to use. The company only recently added scrolling screenshots, a gaming dashboard, and larger headers, all features previously created by manufacturers.
What you can do while waiting
If you want to improve your Share Sheet in the meantime, there’s basically only one thing you can do. You can tap and hold the individual app icons in the sheet and pin them to the second row filled with suggested apps, below the direct share targets. If you often find yourself chatting and sharing on WhatsApp, Telegram, and Google Messenger and pinning those apps, it might already make it easier for you.
Unfortunately, there’s nothing you can do to prevent custom Share Sheets from appearing – that’s entirely up to Google and the developers to fix.
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