Back in November, it emerged that Google was working on an Android version of Apple’s NameDrop feature, which lets you quickly share stuff between iPhones by just getting them close together. Then, in early December, a video showed us how it will all work on Android.
Now, newly activated UI elements have surfaced, and you can see them in the images below which also reveal this feature’s name: tap to share. That’s pretty self-explanatory and probably a much easier to understand name than NameDrop (which is fine to get you to think about contact sharing, but it can also be used to share files and that’s where that name becomes much less helpful).
Google’s Tap to Share for Android
In the left image is a brief description of how it works, in the middle you can see the ‘glow’ animation that the instructions are referring to, and on the right is the new contact sharing screen, which has evolved from the initially leaked one, undoubtedly due to continuous development on Google’s part.
So, to make tap to share work for sending contact info, photos, videos, links, locations, “and more”, you have to have your phone unlocked and overlap both it and the phone it’s sharing to with their screens facing up so that you can see them both. Then you wait for the ‘glow’. If this doesn’t work, Google suggests holding the phones back to back. This dance is required because the placement of the NFC chips on Android phones isn’t standardized.
It’s still unclear when this tap to share functionality will be rolled out. When it does come, we assume it might be exclusive to Google’s Pixels for a certain amount of time before becoming available on more Android devices, since that’s how Google usually does things. Perhaps it will arrive as part of Android 17? Only time will tell.
