Google, please fix Android's slow, bloated share UI | Hacker News Reader

Google, please fix Android's slow, bloated share UI

androidpolice.com

226 pointsahiknsr64 comments

I wish they would improve what suggestions they offer at the top of the menu. It suggests slack channels I've never posted in, contacts I haven't messaged in years, and apps that I've never shared to. Even just having a better heuristic would make it 100x better.

If it just used the last 4 people I had shared a message with it would be such a massive improvement.

I feel like they're trying to do something extremely sophisticated and it's coming out far far worse than if they were doing something extremely simple.

Exactly. There are Slack channels that I share to almost every day that never show up at all. I don't know what they're doing, but it's an obvious failure.

well... "obvious" in what way? you're still sharing, right? essentially, we're still putting up with crappy systems because there's little other choice. And... if you stoped using it... what conclusion do they draw from that?

I think you misunderstand. There are ~8 "suggestions" at the top of the share box. Below them list all of the apps that can accept the content you're sharing. I never choose the suggestions because they're never relevant. I still have to use the sharing feature because there's no alternative. They should see in their telemetry "huh, nobody ever clicks on top top eight results...what's up with that?"

Even just basic user testing of such a fundamental part of a project--sending data between apps--would reveal what an obvious gap this is.

When it comes to the allegorithmic newsfeeds I always assume it’s some metrics person saying “This one got people to stay an average of 3.4 seconds longer and view 0.8 more ads! Great work.”

But maybe with all of these “smart” solutions to problems I’m attributing to malice what can be explained by incompetence and the people building them don’t even realize they’re terrible.

Or maybe they do realize it’s bad but they all say “Yeah it sucks now, but once we figure out how to make it work it’s gonna be great.”

> I feel like they're trying to do something extremely sophisticated and it's coming out far far worse than if they were doing something extremely simple.

This sums up my experience with a huge portion of the Google ecosystem. It's not just Google, of course, but Google particularly sticks out.

It feels like Google really likes to be clever, and just never had anyone take them aside and explain that clever solutions are usually bad. Sometimes I wonder if that extends to their codebases as well as their products; I'd love to be a fly on the wall and hear the conversations that are leading to some of the decisions they make.

Safari's url bar is problematic like that for me - half the time when I type 'fa' (starting to type facebook) - some place I've been minimally 30 times in the last week, from that browser, it'll popup some blog (that stars with fab) I visited once initially in 2015. The only reason I've ever been back to that fab blog is because of muscle memory keystrokes hitting 'return' on safari's flawed suggestion.

There’s a toggle in settings to disable it or remove that site, IIRC. I had the same problem until I fixed it that way.

sure, but... why on earth is it there in the first place? why, after years of not going to a website, is it suddenly becoming the first suggestion, topping sites I visit daily/hourly?

much like the android stuff in the original article, it's just broken, and is a poor experience.

I wasn’t disagreeing with you! It’s annoying as hell. I just wanted to share the fix I came across when I also hit this problem.

Thanks :)

I only ever share to friends/messenger and Twitter, yet ever since I started using Android in 2010 or so, these options are always halfway down the page.

I wrote about this three years ago - https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2015/08/sharing-on-android-is-broke... - using mostly the same examples.

Google employees are mostly interested in building new stuff, not fixing broken old stuff.

There's also no central design authority for Google's Android. Each team implements the same thing in multiple different way.

Which is a shame, because there are plenty of people who would happily fix the bugs in the open source version of Android - but Google doesn't accept patches.

> but Google doesn't accept patches.

is this true that google won't accept public patches? are there any examples?

Go to https://android-review.googlesource.com/q/status:open+OR+sta...

You'll be hard-pressed to find any recent patches from the public. There are some from hardware manufacturers and other organisations like that.

How much of that is Google not accepting those patches vs. just the sheer barrier to entry? Building & flashing AOSP on a device isn't the easiest of things.

By contrast supportlib, which has a _much_ lower barrier to entry, sees considerably more patches (opened & merged) from non-Google and non-major organizations: https://android-review.googlesource.com/q/project:platform/f...

This is due to promotion incentives. There's a much higher chance of getting promoted if you make up something new from scratch, stamp your name all over it and then during performance review demonstrate how many users it impacted so the committee promotes you. Often times people then move on to another team right after the promotion, rinse and repeat.

Even though this issue has been acknowledged internally but the above strategy is still the most promising when it comes to moving up the ladder.

Maybe the ladder itself is the problem. What does a "promotion" for a software engineer even mean?

A more "prestigious" team/project?

For some software engineers, a management position is considered a promotion.

Uhm, what. They're basically overhauling the entirety of Android all the time: New JIT runtime with M, dismantled old mediaserver framework for security reasons, fixed the notification mess by adding channels, permissions were finally fixed in M, every release is seeing improvements to battery efficiency.

The bug report on the Issue Tracker: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/68393945

Outside of the UI consistency issue, simply caching the share link index would largely fix the problem...

The UI consistency problem is the harder problem to solve and a common issue across Android apps, although not anywhere near as bad as it used to be. Maybe Google should publish some guidelines around share button placement? But I'm not sure how that would work exactly... but Google should definitely lead the way here (Youtube using a completely different icon is a great example).

As far as I'm concerned, UI consistency only really matters within apps that look the same. As far as the actual menu options, iOS apps use the native share UI capabilities because it works well and behaves consistently; I'm sure that if the Android one performed as consistently that developers would be more likely to use it instead of being responsible for reinventing another wheel.

Uninstall Slack and Messenger. You will instantly notice the difference, the lag almost disappears.

This makes it seem like it is an amateur design issue, where callbacks are perhaps being called much more often than they are needed. How often does your 'most contacted' list need to change anyway?

I don't think it's limited to those two apps. I use neither of them and I still have issues. Perhaps Whatsapp and hangouts add similar callback hell to the widget?

Whatsapp certainly does.

They just need to implement some intent caching with invalidation callbacks that active apps can call (or push updates to).

Seems so childishly simple from all the way up here, wonder why they haven't done it already.

Because, at Google you do not get promoted if you make small incremental improvements. Especially not if you work on something that does not easily show up in metrics.

You need to launch flashy products and APIs to have the promo committee look at your packet properly. Unsurprisingly, promo driven development ensues.

Google isn't the only stakeholder here. Users and app developers could contribute improvements through AOSP.

Whether or not they'd see the light of day is another question, but it's surprising that stupid issues like this aren't tackled more by the people suffering.

Google's Android build does not use the sharing service used by AOSP, iirc.

Telegram too.

I'm glad to see that Android is just as frustrating as iOS... it's just a completely different set of frustrations. (That's sarcasm). It boggles my mind that two of the richest companies on the planet can't fix this stuff.

Here's my favorite iOS sharing frustration. Often I want to copy a link from Safari. Click the share icon, select copy from the share widget, switch to different app (or another Safari tab), tap paste. There's about a 50% chance that what gets pasted is the URL vs what was previously on the clipboard. I usually perform the share/copy step twice now before trying to paste but that only seems to improve the odds. This bug has existed since at least iOS 9 and occurs for me on multiple devices.

Don't worry, this exact thing happens on Android as well

>It boggles my mind that two of the richest companies on the planet can't fix this stuff.

You're suggesting that they want to fix it at all, rather than build new, shiny things.

I remember when Android first came out, the intents-based Share system seemed revolutionary compared to how sharing worked on every other mobile OS. If it had some rough edges, well, so did everything else in the OS. I think that now, the rest of the OS has generally gotten smooth and polished enough that the general lack of attention to the share system, aside from a few haphazard tweaks, really sticks out as a sore spot. It's about time they showed the share system some UI love. Unfortunately, it's probably too late to do much for it now in the upcoming Android release.

It's "edge" cases like this that make me glad to be on android.

There has been a workaround for this with where you can customize the menu by redirecting all share intents to a specific app. There are cases where apps don't use the standard api for share intents, but in most cases this app works as expected.

I agree Android should have a built in function that provides this level of customization at the OS level. Google should also provide a uniform experience with all apps however I don't mind the fragmentation because it merely a side effect of backwards compatability. Specifically with Youtube, Google shows that they have share intents in mind and are simply experimenting ways to increase user engagement.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andmadesof...

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I am not the author nor affiliated with the app in any way.

This is a fantastic idea and I love you for it. However, is there a more modern app like this? The one you linked seems abandoned, the screenshots are from Android 3.

I would pay money for a good share adapter.

Fliktu is another one: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.oakstar.fl...

Andmade Share is a wee bit more configurable, tho. For example, Firefox adds two share targets for some reason: "Firefox" and "Add to Firefox". With Andmade Share I can enable only one of them; with Fliktu, it's either both or none as you can hide an entire app from the share menu but not just some of its static "sub-targets".

That being said, I prefer Fliktu.

I just discovered this from Reddit and yes, I agree with you. Fliktu looks and works much better, even if some functionality is missing. Thanks!

There are better options if rooted, but Andmade is pretty darn good if you're not. It does feel antiquated though.

Please share the other options. I gave up on andmade a while ago because the UI badly needs a face lift.

Fliktu is another one: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.oakstar.fl...

I can't remember the specific name, but it was within the XPosed framework (which I don't know whether is still supported, I'm out of the loop).

Another app for replacing the share menu is "AppChooser", though unfortunately it hasn't been updated since 2012. But it still works for me, at least on Android 6.

It doesn't need customization, it just needs to increment a counter for each intent's use and sort the pane by usage. I have no idea what algorithm they've been using to sort it, but it's not a good one.

While we are at it, we could speed up iOS's slow share UI too. It's not that hard to cache that kind of stuff.

One place where there is no share button where there should be one is in the "swipe right" news. It's a pretty ok news reader so why no ability to share links? Maybe I missed it but when you hit the vertical "..." I just get a minisurvey about the news source (e.g. hide all stories from blah, etc) instead of a button to share. I sort of dislike going to the page and then doing the in browser share link

It would be nice to enable/disable share targets somehow per application. The question is how to do this in a UI that is powerful, but can provide a curated 'simple mode' for people like my parents.

And please, a headphone jack on the next pixel. Usb-c is awesome, keep that, but everything from airplanes to cheap karaoke machines in China still will forever use 1/8" jacks.

Yes 100%. It is shocking how long it can take to bting up the share dialog and no indication of progress so you can end up clicking again and that click then gets passed to the share dialog when it finally comes up and starts sharing somewhere completely inappropriately.

Sometimes I leave it for several seconds, no share dialog, so press it again, but low and behold it was just taking a really long time. Othertimes I wait and wait and wait and eventually conclude it isn't coming up after all.

After years of training you get better at sharing, very firm clear tap on share and then wait 10 seconds. But then someone else uses my phone and I tell them to share it for me and it goes horribly wrong and they can't quite believe how bad it is, just as I get used to it.

Currently on a Samsung Galaxy S6 but I have had this issue on all Android phones.

The order thing is insane, I wondered if this was all just my phone, maybe a rogue app or bad firmware update, so relieving to hear this happens to others.

There's a certain common expectation one has from any UI. This doesn't exist for me with anything Google - be it search, Youtube, Android, etc. - my first thought is always 'I'll need to fight it to get the results I'm looking for.' That's how they roll.

I dread everytime I accidentally hit the share button on any app, really does need some work.

oh yes please.

also fix the fact that it moves and changes the order of things all the bloody time. that drives me nuts!

this stuff is also extremely slow on iOS.

Every time I've used Android every UI was bloated, slow and buggy. It's surprising the author has found something in particular to complain about.

Is this really an issue for anyone? This seems like a whole lot of complaining over functionality that actually works fairly well in my opinion.

Yes, it's real. And the lag often causes me to accidentally share to the wrong place == really bad.

Same here. Interface elements still shifting around after a second is very bad UX.

Ohyes, and this happens all over the web (looking at you Twitter) and even in the browsers themselves, Firefox is the only browser whose results in the address bar that doesn't jump around. Chrome and Safari are literally unusable for me because of this.

to me it's

1) quite suboptimal

2) becomes bloated with time

I use share every day. It sucks.

Agreed, it's one of those things I've never really given a second thought to as it's so frictionless. I think there's always room for improvement though and there are some good suggestions in here.

On Samsung TouchWiz it is BRUTAL, one of the worst UI designs I've ever encountered.

Not only have I shared to the wrong app on multiple occasions, the direct sharing is useless. I mostly use one app for IMs, but the direct share is always populated by another app.

But this is also not only Google's issue. If you direct share to a contact in Messenger, instead of just sharing whatever you wanted to, Messenger opens the share interface where you can select other people to share to. This is even though you wanted to share to just one.

On my phone the share menu is very fast, but every time I open it, the icons are all over the place...

I like to watch YouTube on Kodi, there's an Android app which can be used as a remote control, and load URLs into the playlist. In binge mode I see the related videos and think "Oh that also looks interesting", so I "share" a lot of videos within a few seconds. Video 1, hit share, look for the remote control app icon, press it, done. Second video, hit share, hunt for the icon because it has moved... Same thing every time! Luckily my phone is quick enough that the share menu doesn't take forever to load, and I've accepted that the icons move around, only quietly swearing "Stupid programmers" every time, but it's still stupid.

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