Users of Android devices over the last few years may be familiar with Nearby Share, a feature that lets users quickly and easily share images, videos, documents, links, and other things between (Android) devices. The feature is even now available on computers running Microsoft’s Windows operating system.
Now, it appears that that Nearby Share is getting a change, at least as far as its name goes.
Various users are reporting getting a notification similar to the one in the featured image above alerting them to the said name change.
Nearby Share, as we have known it, is becoming Quick Share.
That’s fine, yes?
Here is where it gets a little interesting: Quick Share is the name of a similar feature on Samsung devices. On Samsung mobile devices, users don’t get access to Nearby Share. Instead, they get access to a similar feature but with a different name: Quick Share. Quick Share, which has existed longer than Nearby Share, shares much of the functionality of the latter but also, as can be expected, throws in a few extra features of its own to distinguish it and make it stand a little above its near-similar Android counterpart.
Some industry watchers are saying that the renaming of Nearby Share, which, as you can see from the screenshots below shared on X by developer Kamila Wojciechowska, also includes some changes in the user interface, has something to do with Samsung. Specifically, that Samsung and Google are teaming up to merge their efforts on the feature.
If that is so (we wait to see how all of this pans out) then it won’t be the first time that we are seeing such a thing happen. We have seen the two companies join forces on similar initiatives before with Google adopting Samsung’s enterprise mobile security solution Knox and merging it with its own internal efforts before making that the Android standard; Samsung giving up on its Tizen watch OS efforts to brings some of its best features to WearOS, Google’s wearables platform…
