Nearby Share, remember it?
Well, as we have known for a bit, it is going away and, in its place is Quick Share.
Quick Share is the name Samsung has gave its own feature that’s similar to Nearby Share.
For those not in the know, both Nearby Share and Quick Share have, for years, allowed users to be able to be able to transfer files between devices. While Nearby Share existed for all Android devices, Quick Share was exclusive to Samsung Galaxy devices.
While all we could do a few weeks ago was speculate the coming end of Nearby Share’s life, going by the updates a few users were getting, we can now confirm that, indeed, that is the case.
“In 2020, we introduced Nearby Share to make it easy to share files across devices. Samsung also has its own capability called Quick Share, which is loved by their users. Collaborating with Samsung, we’re bringing the best of our sharing solutions together into a singular cross-Android solution under the Quick Share name. We’ve integrated the experiences and created the best default, built-in option for peer-to-peer content sharing across all types of devices in the Android and Chromebook ecosystems,” Google announced on January 9th, just a week before Samsung’s unveiling of its new 2024 flagship smartphone series, the Galaxy S24 series.
Last night at its Unpacked event, Samsung confirmed that it had indeed joined forces with Google to offer users of all Android devices, not just its Galaxy devices, access to Quick Share.
Quick Share will now let users of Samsung Galaxy devices share files with one another, share files with users of other Android devices that are not Samsung Galaxy devices as well as let those users of Android devices share files among themselves and then share files between their mobile devices and compatible desktop-class computing devices like PCs.
For the PCs, Google announced a week ago that it was working with a number of PC makers, starting with LG, to have Quick Share functionality included.
Quick Share will start rolling out to current Nearby Share-enabled devices next month (February 2024). Will it be better than Apple’s AirDrop feature, though?
