GoKawiilTL;DR Google has announced that it’s bringing Quick Share to third-party apps, starting with WhatsApp.
The company says this solution is useful if your Android phone doesn’t have AirDrop support.
Google also says it’s bringing AirDrop to plenty more brands later this year, including OnePlus, Xiaomi, and more.
Quick Share is arguably the easiest way to share files between Android phones, Android tablets, and PCs. Now, Google has revealed that Quick Share is spreading to third-party apps.
Google announced that third-party Android apps such as WhatsApp will soon get Quick Share functionality. The company is positioning this as an alternative local-sharing solution for Android phones without AirDrop support.
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“We wanted to make Quick Share compatible with AirDrop on as many phones as possible, but there needs to be some supported hardware. And so the Quick Share technology will be built into WhatsApp,” Googler Dieter Bohn told a media briefing in response to an Android Authority question.
“So if you want to share a file with somebody who doesn’t have AirDrop compatibility with Quick Share, they can open up WhatsApp, and it will go directly (to them). It won’t have to go up the internet and back down again. We wanted to make local file sharing work for as many people as possible, because that seems like an obvious thing that should just work in 2026.”
What else to know about Quick Share in apps? Google revealed more details about this feature in response to an Android Authority email. For one, it confirmed that Quick Share in third-party apps can share files with native Quick Share on Android, ChromeOS, and Windows.
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