Quick Share for iOS and macOS might be in the works

Quick Share is one of the best tools you can use to move files between Android phones as it’s preinstalled on most devices. It’s also preinstalled on most Chromebooks and can easily be installed on any Windows PC, too. However, one platform where it’s notably missing is iOS, which means you have to find another solution if you want to share files with anyone who has an iPhone. Thankfully, though, Google may finally be working on bringing Quick Share to iOS as well as macOS.

Google introduced Quick Share (formerly Nearby Share) in 2020. It’s a file-transfer service that lets you quickly move any number of files over a local network connection. It’s built on top of Nearby Connections, a peer-to-peer networking API that lets apps “easily discover, connect to, and exchange data with nearby devices in real-time, regardless of network connectivity.” The source code for Nearby Connections is available on GitHub under Google’s Nearby repository, which is regularly updated by engineers at Google to introduce new backend features and bug fixes.

One such bug fix resolves an issue on iOS and macOS devices where the non-localized account name is used in conjunction with the device type when returning the name. However, this isn’t necessary as “the device name is already localized” on iOS and macOS and “generally works well for Quick Share purposes (i.e. “Niko’s MacBook Pro”).”

The fact that a Google engineer explicitly calls out how this bug fix benefits Quick Share on iOS and macOS — even though Google hasn’t released an app for either OS yet — suggests to me that Google might be working on a client for both platforms. It’s also possible that Google is only fixing this bug so it can lay the groundwork for future iOS and macOS clients that it hasn’t started working on yet, or it might not even be working on clients for either platform at all and is just fixing bugs that it finds in Nearby. I don’t know for sure what Google’s plans are because Quick Share itself isn’t open source, so the only hint I have is this comment.

If Google is working on a Quick Share client for iOS and macOS, I wouldn’t be too surprised, because it wouldn’t be the first time that the company released a client for a competing platform. Google launched Quick Share for Windows last year to make it easier for Android phones and tablets to share files with Windows PCs. Google’s goal in releasing that client was likely to reduce the number of users installing alternative solutions like Windows Phone Link and to satisfy its OEM partners who also manufacture Windows PCs. Releasing Quick Share for iOS and macOS would give users of both platforms one less reason to be locked in to both platforms, especially if it achieves mass adoption.

Therein lies the biggest challenge with Google releasing Quick Share for Apple’s platforms, especially iOS: mass adoption. Google would have to either release Quick Share as a standalone app or integrate it into one of its existing apps, but I doubt the company would do the latter considering it doesn’t have a Google Play Services equivalent on either platform and thus would struggle to not only surface the feature to users but also justify asking for the additional permissions it would need. A standalone app might be tough to convince iPhone users to download, though, which is one of the criticisms that some people have with the new Share with iPhone feature in OxygenOS 15.

In any case, this is all speculation at the moment, as we don’t even know for sure if Google plans to release Quick Share for iOS and macOS. We reached out to Google for comment a few days ago but haven’t received a response yet, so if Google is working on a Quick Share client for both platforms, it wants to keep mum about it. In the meantime, you can use the open source NearDrop app to send files from Android to macOS.