We asked, you told us: Plenty of you haven't used Nearby Share before

Nearby Share is Android’s answer to AirDrop on iOS devices, promising a more seamless way to locally share content. The feature works with Android 6.0 devices and above, which means chances are good that you’ve got access to it.

We wanted to know whether you’ve used Nearby Share before and what you thought of it. So we posed this question on our website, Twitter account, and YouTube page. Here’s how you voted.

Have you used Nearby Share before?

Results

The poll accrued just over 1,400 votes on the website, roughly 2,100 votes on Twitter, and 3,700 votes on YouTube. And it turns out that almost half of the voters across all three platforms haven’t used it yet. 

It seems like the reason for these people not using it either boils down to them not knowing about it or a preference for other sharing options (e.g. OEM protocols, third-party apps, or internet-based sharing). Nevertheless, the proportion of users who haven’t used Nearby Share spans from 40% on the Android Authority website all the way to 55% on our YouTube poll.

Related: The best file sharing apps for Android

Almost 32% of respondents on average said they used Nearby Share and that it worked well, while almost 13% said that it was merely okay when they used it.

Finally, 6.42% of total polled readers said they used the sharing protocol before but that it worked poorly. Some reader comments pointed to issues like slow transfer speeds when sharing large video files and questionable reliability.

Looking at it another way, roughly 51% of all polled readers said they’d used Nearby Share before (regardless of how they felt about the feature) while ~49% said they hadn’t used it.

Comments

• Staicu: I used it once to see how it is, other than that I had no use for it
• Killsmetosay: I use it all the time with my spin 713
• Seela: I use it from time to time, connection is a problem sometimes.
• Okiki Ojo: I personally don’t use Nearby Share, because it requires location, when Samsungs Quick Share doesn’t
• Agalaxyuser: I use Samsung’s quick share way more often
• Evie: Almost everyday, to send files to myself. Works effortlessly between my phone, Chromebook and Kindle Fire 
• Anthorama: I use it, I like it, but sometimes it’s crazy fast, sometimes it’s slow, sometimes there’s errors for unknown reason. I would love to see more reliability into this nice (and basic) feature
• Birch Tree: It didn’t really work for me so I just fell back to transferring the file via Bluetooth
• Anupam Babu: It is really fast and i like to use it often
• Godwine: Sharing smaller sized files, yeah works great. Sharing large video files, man!!! It can take forever. Xender does it in half the time…and I don’t even like Xender no more.