00:00 – Mishaal Rahman: Google is finally bringing Quick Share to iPhones, but maybe not in the way you think.
00:04 – C. Scott Brown: And your Pixel phone may soon scan your chat messages to warn you about scammers.
00:10 – Mishaal Rahman: I’m Mishaal Rahman.
00:12 – C. Scott Brown: And I’m C. Scott Brown, and this is the Authority Insights Podcast where we break down the latest news and leaks surrounding the Android operating system.
00:21 – Mishaal Rahman: So last year, we broke the news that Google may be working on bringing Quick Share to iOS and macOS. Since then, we’ve had Google I/O, Made by Google, and even the most recent Apple event pass by, and there’s still no word on when this new feature would launch. But we’ve dug up new evidence to suggest Google might be bringing Quick Share to iPhones soon, however, it may not work offline, which would be a big bummer.
00:45 – C. Scott Brown: Google has also baked some powerful scam detection features into its messages and phone app, but that has left out people who don’t use the messages or phone app. So, it looks like they could be working on extending this feature to third-party chat apps, which I’m sure will make a lot of people happy. And in our third story today, we also want to talk about Samsung, which may be building an AI chatbot right into its health app.
01:11 – Mishaal Rahman: All right, so before we dive into the first story, a quick programming note. Next week there won’t be an episode because both Scott and myself will be traveling. I’ll be attending a Xiaomi launch event. And I believe Scott, you’ll be in Hawaii for the Snapdragon Summit, so that’s pretty exciting.
01:28 – C. Scott Brown: Yeah, I wish we had a soundboard so I could play like a little Hawaiian like luau sound or something, but yes. Yes, I’ll be in Hawaii so that’ll be a blast.
01:37 – Mishaal Rahman: All right, so the first story for today, the Quick Share story. This is a big one because you know, Quick Share. This is the airdrop for Android. You use an Android phone, hopefully you’re listening to this podcast, you’re already familiar with what Quick Share is. But if you’re not, this is the peer-to-peer file sharing service that is available on all Android devices because it is actually part of Google Play Services. It leverages Bluetooth to basically facilitate the pairing between devices and then it hands off that connection to Wi-Fi Direct. Then you can actually very quickly transfer many different files over multi-gig like connection speed because it’s all local peer-to-peer, fully offline. However, for the longest time, there has not been an equivalent way to share files between Android and iOS devices. You have had to use maybe like Google Drive, you upload your file to Google Drive, and then you share that link with your iPhone friend, or you, I don’t know, share the file via Gmail or Telegram or Facebook Messenger. But there’s never been a quick built-in peer-to-peer file transfer solution between Android phones and iPhones. And a large part of that is because Apple, they have their Airdrop feature and it works between Apple devices, but they don’t make it available on Android devices. So there’s no way to actually use Airdrop on Android devices to actually transfer files. But it looks like Google might be working on bringing Quick Share to Apple devices, which would enable you to actually transfer files between, you know, Android phones and iPhones or Mac devices quite seamlessly. Now, Scott, how excited are you for this possibility?
03:26 – C. Scott Brown: Well, I use Quick Share every day. I use it a lot. I take a photo with my phone. I can immediately share it with my laptop. I, you know, travel a lot for work. I’ll have a receipt that I’ve saved on my phone. Maybe I took a photo of it or I took a screenshot if it was a Google Wallet receipt and just being able to share all this stuff between my laptop and my phone back and forth without having to plug anything in. And it also works offline. It is amazing. I’ve done this on airplanes, you know, like in airplane mode. I just been, you know, sharing things back and forth, which is really awesome. The idea of being able to share things with iPhones, I think is cool, but what’s going to inevitably happen is it’s going to be similar to the RCS situation, I think, where Google’s going to say, okay, Apple, you don’t want to play ball, that’s fine. We’re going to develop a system to work around you and it’s going to be bad. Like it’s going to be inconvenient and it’s going to not work well and it’s going to frustrate iPhone users. And then Apple’s going to have to step in and be like, well, I guess we’re going to have to fix this because now our users are getting pissed off. And I think that this it’s a brilliant strategy. It worked for RCS and now Google’s like, we’ll just continue doing this because it is stupid. Like obviously, you know, Apple wants the iPhone experience to be great. And so it makes sharing from iPhone to iPhone great. You know, it makes perfect sense. Apple has to understand that not everyone who associates with someone who uses an iPhone uses an iPhone. So it’s like it actively makes owning an iPhone bad by limiting things to only going iPhone to iPhone. Like it has to start understanding this. And so yeah, I think that I think that what Google is doing is being like we’re going to push you in the right direction. And so, yeah, I’m excited for this not because this implementation is going to be good, because I can almost guarantee it’s not going to be and you’re going to explain, I’m sure what we’re what we’re thinking it’s going to be and but I am excited for, you know, two, three years down the road when Apple’s like, we have to fix this because now it’s a mess. And then it’ll be so easy. Then it’ll just be like, hey, you know, hey, iPhone-using friend, here’s a file. It just goes. Like and and that’ll be awesome. So I’m excited for that. This sounds like a mess to me.
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