With Android Q, the sharing menu doesn't suck as much

Last year, Android’s own VP of engineering David Burke tweeted that the Android sharing menu as it currently stands needs to be “much faster and easier to use.” Well, it appears he was serious about making a change, as the first beta of Android Q features a slightly revamped sharing menu that is, in fact, faster and easier to use.

Now, when you share something like a webpage link or a photo you’ve taken, the share menu looks a little different. If you’re sharing a webpage, for example, at the top of the new share menu will be the URL you are sharing along with a “copy” icon that will copy the link to the clipboard. Below that link will be the usual share icons for different apps on your device.

However, those share icons will appear much faster than usual. It appears Google has altered the API for connecting apps to Android’s native sharing module. With that in mind, it could be that some apps will share faster than others as they adopt this new API.

While this isn’t a drastic overhaul of the sharing menu, it certainly is nice to see that Google is working to make this long-clunky feature better overall. Also, this is only the first public beta of Android Q — we still have five more releases to go. In that time, who knows how much better the sharing menu could be made.

NEXT: There are six Android Q beta versions on Google’s Q timeline