What you need to know
- Google detailed the changes it made to make the share sheet in Android 10 much faster at the Android Dev Summit held this past week.
- With Android 10, Google replaced Direct Share with the new Sharing Shortcuts API, which allows apps to preload direct share targets.
- An internal study conducted by the company found that 50% of users on Android 10 could see the share UI in just 27 milliseconds after tapping on the share option.
Google introduced the Direct Share feature with Android Marshmallow in 2015, allowing users to share different types of content within apps. For a long time, however, the Share menu on Android has been painfully slow. Thanks to a few major changes that Google made to the Share menu on Android 10, it is now much faster than before. At the Android Dev Summit held this past week, Google shed light (via XDA Developers) on some of the things that it did to improve the performance of the Share sheet on Android 10 and also shared some numbers comparing it with Android 9 Pie.
Google uses a new Sharing Shortcuts API in Android 10, which makes allows the Share menu to preload share targets, enabling it to load much faster than earlier. With the older APIs, the system had to start building a list of shareable targets when users chose the share option, greatly affecting the loading speed. Apart from the new API, Google also simplified the Share menu and repositioned the copy button to the top to make it easier to access.
While detailing these changes at the Android Dev Summit, Artur Tsurkan, Product Manager at Google, showed a graph that highlights the significant improvement in Share sheet loading speed on Android 10 when compared to Android 9 Pie. The internal study conducted by Google found 50% of Android 10 users could see the share UI just 27 milliseconds after tapping on 'Share'. In comparison, only 9% of Android 9 Pie users could see the share UI after 27 milliseconds.
Android 10: Everything you need to know!
