Google’s Quick Share has been an important part of Android for a few years now, but it still has a few hidden tricks, including the ability to trigger sharing by simply tapping the phone you want to share to.
Yesterday, a fresh One UI 9 leak showcased a (seemingly) new “Tap to Share” gesture planned for Samsung’s upcoming Android 17 update this summer, with prior leaks having pointed to this feature coming to Android devices at large. One reader, @LBPHeretic on Twitter, tagged us this morning to draw our attention to a semi-secret function buried within Quick Share that basically allows the old Android Beam-esque tap to share functionality to continue working.
This isn’t new, to be clear — this functionality has existed within Quick Share since it was actually referred to as Nearby Share. A comment on three-year-old Reddit thread explains it perfectly: if you tap the backs of two Android devices together while one is attempting to share a file through Quick Share, it should automatically begin the transfer process, just as Android Beam worked way back in the day. Believe it or not, tech publications — including 9to5Google — actually reported on this way back in 2021, but considering how fast this space moves, it’s understandable that a relatively obscure file sharing trick would, you know, eventually disappear from the public consciousness.
I will suggest, however, another reason people might be forgetting about it: it doesn’t work great, at least on my end. Sharing between devices from the same manufacturer is easy enough — I transferred several images back and forth between a Pixel 10 and Pixel 10a — but I have yet to get either device to recognize my Galaxy S26, and vice versa. In both cases, Quick Share could see the other phone, but I needed to interact with the actual Quick Share UI to start the process. Without a clear visual distinction, it’s tricky to troubleshoot what might be happening in the background to prevent this process, or if it’s really as simple as mismatching OEMs.
But hey, your mileage may vary. If you didn’t already know that the bones of Android Beam still exist on your device, give it a try next time you need to transfer a file. Even with this existing system, it seems like tapping to share is about to get a whole lot more obvious if and when it presumably arrives on One UI 9 — and other Android devices — later this year.
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