Apple’s wireless file sharing service, AirDrop, might soon be getting a competitor in the Android side of things. While users have been clamouring for similar features in Android for quite some time, Android has so far remained lacking in that one aspect. Xiaomi, Oppo, and Vivo recently announced that they’re going to bring a cross-device file transfer feature, and last year, there were reports that Google is working on a feature called ‘Fast Share’, and now, XDA Developers is reporting that the feature is probably being renamed to ‘Nearby Share’ instead.
XDA found the change thanks to an APK teardown of the latest Google Play Services v20.1.3. Screenshots shared by XDA show the Nearby Sharing UI that Google is working on. It looks fairly clean, but a string of text at the very bottom shows one of the biggest weaknesses of the feature. According to the text, devices need to be placed within 1 feet of each other for Nearby Share to work. In contrast, AirDrop works over much larger distances, but does have issues with reliability. Hopefully that’s something Google will solve with its iteration of the feature.
Obviously, since this information is based off of an APK teardown, things might change before Google actually launches this to the public, but the recent naming change does hint that the company is probably making some final adjustments to the feature before launching it.
