The article brings up a great point. This tool is so esencial I wonder why is it that Apple and Android have not made this natively much simpler. Seems like a great venture to be a part of.
This is already amazingly simple on Android natively though. This is an attempt to make it similarly simple on iOS.
Edit since I can't reply to milesokeefe: As an avid android user (Galaxy Nexus), some things about intents that I feel are poorly designed: - No support for bidirectionality. There's no sense of "I'm done with this action, take the results and send it back" - No sense of intelligence in terms of what actions are shown. As far as I can tell, it seems to be filtered by content type, sorted by Most Recently Used. - Unclear actions - iOS suffers the same issue, where it's not really clear what it means to open in another application.
Doesn't startActivityForResult fit this use case?
> No sense of intelligence in terms of what actions are shown.
I agree here, it can be annoying to pair down the list of applications which will handle an intent. If one wants specific applications one can use the package manager to check its existence and then use that.