Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority
TL;DR
- In the new beta for Google Play Services, we spotted an unannounced drag-and-drop feature for Quick Share on Android.
- This is already supported on Windows, but Android support would benefit tablets and other large-screen devices.
- While it’s clear the functionality is a work in progress, it doesn’t actually work at the moment.
Quick Share — formerly known as Nearby Share — is a tool for easily sharing files between two devices that are not physically connected. The easiest way to think about it is like AirDrop but for non-Apple systems. Quick Share works on Android phones and tablets, Chromebooks, and Windows PCs, making it an essential tool for anyone not in the Apple ecosystem. Today, through an APK teardown, we found evidence to suggest that Quick Share is about to get even better.
An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
In the latest beta for Google Play Services (24.34.32 beta), we found evidence to suggest Google is working on a way to enable drag-and-drop functionality within Quick Share. Those of you using Quick Share on Windows will already be familiar with this: you simply open the Quick Share app and then drag the file you want to share over the device with which you want to share it. When you “drop” the file on the device’s icon, the app pushes it to that device. It’s super simple.
Unfortunately, when you’re using an Android system, this doesn’t work. Check out what happens now on an Android tablet in the video clip below:
Because Quick Share doesn’t work this way, you need to find the file you’d like to share, hit the associated app’s “Share” button, find the Quick Share icon, and then choose the device with which you want to share it. It’s not nearly as convenient.
In the future, though, Google might allow you to drag and drop the file, just like you can do on Windows. We were able to get this feature mostly working on the same Android tablet. Check out the difference in this video clip:
As you can see, the function doesn’t actually work — Quick Share did not share the file. However, the difference in behavior when you drag the file into the app heavily suggests that Google is working on making this happen.
Not only would this be a big boon for Android tablet users, but it would also be helpful for other large-screen Android devices, such as foldable phones. Additionally, it could be incredibly helpful for the long-awaited native desktop mode we’ve wanted Android to have for years now (it exists; it’s just not great).
There’s no telling how long it might take for this feature to go live. We’ll keep an eye out for further developments.
