It seems like almost every phone maker is building an AirDrop clone – be it Xiaomi, Vivo, and Oppo who joined hands to work on it together or Samsung’s Quick Share. Well, let’s not forget about Google as the Android maker has itself been prepping a similar feature (read AirDrop clone) called Nearby Sharing for quite some time now. And today, we have got a look at how it’s going to work when it rolls out to Android users.
Thanks to the folks over at XDA Developers, who have got Nearby Sharing to work on two of their Pixel devices – the Pixel 4 and Pixel 2 XL, we can see this feature in action for the first time.
As shown in the video below, you will quickly be able to enable Nearby Sharing from the quick settings toggles up-top. A long-press opens the settings page for this feature and you can see the Google account it’s linked to and change the name of the device. This name will be shown to other users.
You will then find a couple of essential settings that allow you to tweak how the Nearby Sharing feature will work on your Android device. First is device visibility, where you can choose whether you want your device to be visible to all Google contacts, certain contacts, or be hidden so that no one bugs you — unnecessarily sending memes as a prank. Secondly, you can pick whether data and Wi-Fi services should be used for faster transfers or no Internet connectivity is required.
The video reveals that Google’s Nearby Sharing will use Bluetooth and location services, which is understandable, for the initial connection between the devices. Then, we see a couple of pictures being sent from one Pixel device to another. The feature works pretty well every time but fails while sending a video – succeeding on the second try.
Yeah, Google’s Nearby Sharing feature for Android does seem a little rough around the edges but it’s ready for prime time. We would love to see Google finally talk about their AirDrop clone on stage at Google I/O 2020 in mid-May later this year.
