It’s 2020 and Android manufacturers are finally realising that Android needs something like Apple’s AirDrop to complete an overall improved user experience.
Unfortunately it seems that we may end up with this scene being heavily fragmented thanks to some manufacturers going their own way. Samsung is one company that has developed their own solution called Quick Share.
XDA Developers have managed to extract the APK file and find out some details of Quick Share. As you would hope you can restrict who can send you files — “Everyone” or “Contacts Only” which are fairly self explanatory.
Quick Share will have a cloud component involved where you can temporarily upload images to your Samsung Cloud which can then be streamed to Samsung Smart Things devices and downloaded locally. The cloud aspect is limited to 1GB per file and 2GB per day — that doesn’t help you much with uPNP etc on your Samsung TV.
The new service is expected to launch with the Galaxy S20 in just a few weeks time with the APK present on the S20+ 5G only (from their source) but is expected to be backwards compatible via a software update.
It remains to be seen if it is compatible with Google’s Nearby Sharing or OPPO/Vivo/Xiaomi’s file sharing platform. We don’t mind each manufacturer coming up with their own ideas but it would be nice if they were all cross compatible with each other — something we think is extremely unlikely. Hopefully Google build theirs into Android itself so that in the end all devices will support it.
It is good to see manufacturers finally bringing out AirDrop competitors but do they have to fragment it so much? Can’t we all just get along?
Even if Google builds theirs into Android, considering the known behaviour of Samsung toward Google’s included apps, I can all too easily see the Google app being MIA on Samsung devices, and Samsung Quick Share being set up as an auto-starting system app which the device owner is NOT permitted to remove.
Samsung ensures they dont get stuck like how Huawei is right now.
They can fork android and their galaxy store is ready with basic apps