Nearby Share

Material You redesign for Nearby Share finally begins rolling out more widely

Damien Wilde | Mar 10 2023 - 1:33 am PT

After appearing in late 2022, the Material You refresh or retune of Nearby Share now finally appears to be rolling out more widely to devices.

The Nearby Share function is one of a number of features that isn’t spoken about enough as a killer Android addition. Available on most devices running Android 6.0 or higher, a minor facelift was spotted back in December 2022, but for whatever reason, this didn’t expand very widely. It appears that Google is now pushing the Material You tweaks to Nearby Share more widely.

When initiating Nearby Share, a sheet will slide into view and your device will start the process of “Looking for nearby devices.” Previously this would bring up a sectioned panel with a glowing left-to-right wave indicating that this is occurring. With Material You playing a prominent part in Android, the Nearby Share panel has changed to include various shapes that will animate and expand behind your on-device profile avatar.

All text within the Nearby Share panel also is centralized with more system colors applied on devices that run Android 12 or higher in our testing. Share previews are increased in size while the Nearby Share icon is prominent:

Sending files has changed slightly too. Available devices will appear highlighted with a star-style Material You icon. If you are receiving large files, the Nearby Share panel now has a loading graphic that features a collage of Material You shapes that also adhere to Dynamic Color settings on your device.

While a relatively minor change, this combined with upcoming changes in Android 14 helps create even more cohesion for Google’s ongoing Material You theming throughout the mobile operating system. It appears as though these overdue Material You tweaks for Nearby Share are coming via a server-side update with the latest version of Google Play Services.