It's time for Google to fix Android's share menu - Android Police

Suggested contacts in the top "direct share" row rarely consist of people you regularly talk to, and far too many apps (including Google apps!) have started implementing their own custom share sheets that prevent any muscle memory from building up.

It's likely that this unsatisfactory situation also gave rise to so-called custom share sheets — alternate in-app sharing capabilities implemented by app developers that often mostly mirror the system-wide sharing dialog.

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 an alphabetical collection of other targets (all other eligible apps for the content in question).

There are two problems with the current implementation of the share menu: Custom share sheets and direct share targets.

These custom versions offer some functionality that isn't available in the Android system share sheet, but often also come with much fewer sharing targets than their system pendant.

If you look at some of the apps in your system share sheet on Android 11 (or 12), you'll notice that they have small drop-down arrows next to their name, signaling that you'll open a menu when tapping them.

In this menu, you'll find some of the same specific sharing options that you can sometimes spot in the app's custom share sheet.

That's the case for Chrome: Its custom share sheet has five options — sharing a screenshot, copying the current link to your clipboard, sending a link to your devices, creating a QR code, and printing.

In addition to its custom share sheet, it has a drop-down menu in the system share menu that lets you select to tweet, DM, or add to a Fleet.

What if app developers could get an extra row in the system share sheet for some custom in-app actions.

I added the relevant four sharing options from its custom menu to the system share sheet, and I feel like this might be the most elegant solution.

App developers could keep their specialty sharing options, but users wouldn't have to make extra steps just to share to an app that a developer hasn't included into their custom share sheet.

By hitting that forward button, you can exclusively select a contact from WhatsApp or Telegram to forward media or a message to, but if you hit the Android share icon, the regular sharing sheet pulls up and you can go ahead and share with another app.

If you ask me, we could get rid of this direct share row altogether and use the space to introduce the custom in-app sharing options as detailed above — at least if Google is unwilling to change anything about the algorithm that picks contacts.

Another idea for this direct share section is the option to pick and pin specific contacts from your favorite apps, much like you can pin apps to the row below the direct share targets.

In it, you can decide which contacts to pin to direct share and select which apps should show up in the menu at all

You can tap and hold individual app icons in the sheet and pin them to the second row filled with suggested apps, below the direct share targets