Google hints that Quick Share could come to iOS and macOS, but would anyone use it?

Google’s Quick Share is AirDrop for Android, but there’s some loose evidence that it could be coming to Apple’s iOS and macOS platforms at some point.

Quick Share is a useful tool. It allows Android users to share photos, videos, links, and other files across nearby devices. It works across Android, ChromeOS, and also Windows with an official app available. However, it seems Google may be looking at expanding that.

Through a comment on Google’s “Nearby” repository on GitHub, the folks at Android Authority spotted a Google engineer hinting at Quick Share on macOS and iOS. The comment was specifically in regards to how Quick Share pulls the name of a device. The engineer said:

[For] iOS and macOS, the device name is already localized and generally works well for Quick Share purposes (i.e. “Niko’s MacBook Pro”), so avoid using the non-localized account name and device type concatenation.

While it’s no explicit confirmation, this comment and the associated bug fix suggests that Google is potentially paving the way for Quick Share on iOS and macOS.

The question that remains, really, is whether or not anyone would actually use this functionality.

Quick Share is already on a non-Google platform in Windows, and porting the app over to macOS seems like a no-brainer (and someone has, notably, already ported the app over unofficially). While Android users are often using Windows machines, it’s far from uncommon to use an Android phone alongside a MacBook. Equally common is owning an iPad alongside an Android phone, seeing as Android tablets have been lagging behind for many years.

As such, there’s certainly a set of users that would benefit greatly from a Quick Share app on iOS and/or macOS, but it’s unclear if that group is large enough to actually get Google to build out such functionality. For the greater iPhone audience, a Quick Share app would likely go unused, as it’s been proven time and time again that, even if it’s for the sake of improving the experience between two users on different devices, it’s rather difficult to get iPhone users to download new apps. OnePlus and Oppo, for instance, just launched a file sharing tool for cross-platform sharing, but it’s a hard sell.

So, with that in mind, it’s rather clear that if these apps even did debut, Google would be building it out for its Android users that live across platforms, rather than for the general public.

What do you think? Would you benefit from these apps?

More on Quick Share:

• Google rolling out new update for Quick Share app on Windows
• Files by Google rolling out ‘Receive’ Quick Share FAB
• Google might make Quick Share on Android even quicker with the help of QR codes

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