Quick Share could get upgraded transfer bar with percent complete (APK teardown)

Does there exist any UI element more frustrating than the progress bar? While ostensibly a quite useful visualization, anyone who’s installed a lot of software or copied a lot of files can testify to all the ways those good intentions can go wrong. However, Google is working on what looks to be a nice new enhancement for Quick Share that seriously upgrades how it shows file transfer progress, adding a numerical percentage-complete display.

All too often, progress bars seem to just show that our software is doing something, rather than quickly and clearly communicating how close the current task is to completion. Maybe that means a bar that’s constantly filling and resetting as it tracks thousands of little tasks, instead of giving you the birds-eye view you really want. Or sometimes you just don’t get an update frequently enough to be meaningful, watching your bar jump from barely started to almost full, after minutes of waiting.

Google’s Quick Share feature also has a little progress bar — or in this case, progress circle. And while we have to concede that this one works pretty cleanly already, there’s room for improvement. That improvement could be made soon with the addition of numbers spelling out the exact percentage completed.

Spotted in Google Play Services 24.26.31 beta, we were able to trigger a flag that adds a percent-complete readout to Quick Share’s progress circle. Whether you’re bad at fractions or just hate ambiguity, this is one very welcome addition in our book. Power users may lament the lack of anything displaying your transfer rate, or reflecting the exact amount of data remaining, but remember that this is Quick Share — not Power Share.

With any luck we’ll be seeing this addition go live for Quick Share on Android in the weeks to come.