Quick Share is AirDrop for Android in many ways, but one surprising omission has been the lack of any cross-compatibility with iPhone. New evidence shows that Google might be moving towards an account-based solution for this.
Google rolled out Quick Share for Android devices a few years ago, and has since expanded the file-sharing solution to ChromeOS and Windows. But if you’re in Apple’s ecosystem, you’re out of luck. There have been some efforts to create AirDrop-like solutions that work between Android phones and iOS – Oppo’s “O+ Connnect” comes to mind – but there’s no real go-to that works on all Android devices.
That’s where Quick Share could play a role, and it seems Google is working on some form of iPhone support.
Last year, comments from Google were spotted that hinted at potential future support for iOS and macOS, but we’ve not heard much in the time since.
The folks over at Android Authority have now spotted evidence in Google Play Services that suggests an account-based method of sharing with iPhones. A pop-up that was manually enabled says that users will be able to “share end-to-end encrypted files with iPhone and other devices” but only when signed in. That’s opposed to Quick Share’s Android-to-Android functionality, which works regardless of whether or not you’re signed in.
So how does this work? Presumably, Google is making an iOS app for Quick Share, but it also stands to reason this could be a sort of temporary cloud backup.
Whatever the case may be, it’ll be nice to see this roll out. Eventually.
More on Quick Share:
- Samsung’s One UI 8 introduces major Quick Share redesign
- Google rolling out ‘Use mobile data’ for Quick Share on Android
- Google Quick Share widely rolling out QR code sharing
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