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Comment by mmahemoff | Hacker News Reader

Yes, inter-app communication is a major difference for developers. On iOS, apps will say "Supports Twitter and Facebook" and the developers have hand-written the integrations; on Android, the app integrates with whatever the user has installed and the developer does no work at all to integrate with any specific service or app. So it's a win for developers as well as users.

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Twitter and Facebook is integrated at a OS level with iOS. A few lines of code gets me access to the user's accounts (with their permission of course).

Bad examples :). Try Buffer and App.Net instead.

So what happens in Android with those apps? Your app opens your App.net client of choice?

A bit more generic than that; there's no global setting where user says "this is my preferred App.Net app". When user hits Share in any app (many apps provide such a feature), a menu appears with all available apps user might want to share to. Any app can opt in to be in the menu, based on MIME type of what's being shared.

http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2012/02/share-with-in...

Does it take you out of the app or bring up a part of the other app which you use to share and then dismiss and you are back exactly where you were before you attempted to share?

That's how it usually works though there's a lot of flexibility. In some cases, it might not even be interactive at all, e.g. adding to your Pocket queue, you'd just hit the Pocket menu item and you're back where you were.

Apps can register to handle URIs, which can be local, or something like http://*.reddit.com/* so whenever a link to reddit is found in say an email or web page, you can choose how to handle it, either via the browser app, or a reddit client.

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