As tech-junkies one thing that really irks us is consistently poor performance of a piece of hardware, component or software that could or should be better than it is. The native share menu is one of those annoyances for many as it is often far slower than we would like it to be when populating the options of where you want to share the selected data.

This has been acknowledged by Dave Burke, VP of Engineering at Android in a tweet reply to Artem from Android Police stating itโ€™s a priority butโ€ฆ with a substantial hurdle in front of the coders completing the work.

The problem with the menu has been identified in the past: each time you use the share menu, Android scans through your installed apps to identify which ones you could potentially share via to generate that menu and then display it. This process stands true, even if youโ€™ve not installed any new applications for a significant period of time, taking longer and longer with more apps installed on your device only part being combatted with the improved hardware speeds.

Having personally queried a couple of developers they all had their idea on how to speed up the menu. Ranging from every โ€œXโ€ time period polling apps on the device to have the menu pre-populated, to having the option to have a set selection that you define as a user, checking once a day (perhaps overnight) or even checking every time you install an app whether it should be added to the list.

Regardless of the pathway chosen, it will be great to see a speedier interface when wanting to share something quickly through Android. Hopefully Google bring this to Android soon but it would surprise us to see it before Android Q.

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Raymond Tracer

Why couldn’t they cache the apps that allow for sharing and listen to install/uninstall events to refresh the cache?

pdf

It’s not just apps any more – there are dynamic targets, like contacts.

Bjorn

Once you notice the problem, you can’t unsee it. I rage almost every time it takes me 45-60 seconds to share a flipping link. Half the problem for me is absolutely no consistency any time the share menu is called up. It’s a lucky dip whether Buffer is at the start, halfway down or at the end. Pinning sort of works but implementation is shoddy at best and non-existent at worst.