Quick Share might soon give your family an easier way to share files with you

Quick Share has received a lot of love and attention from Google in recent months. After its redesign last year, Quick Share has been the new poster child for Google’s resistance to Apple’s walled-garden approach (after it successfully met its objectives with RCS chat). With AirDrop support on Quick Share now being opened up for a wider range of Android devices, Google may be turning its attention to adding options to make it more useful.

Back in February, Google removed a key sharing feature from Quick Share with the intent to make it more secure. Now, it appears to be working to include another one so people you trust can send you files easily.

Google may be working to make it easier to receive files from your family members through Quick Share. While the current options for Quick Share visibility include “Your devices,” “Contacts,” and “Everyone for 10 minutes,” Google might add another option for “Family.”

We’ve discovered a new “Family” attribute in Google’s GitHub repository for Nearby Share, formerly known as Quick Share. The upcoming Family option may be used as a substitute for the “Selected contacts only” option, which has now been deprecated.

There’s no description around how Google plans to let users choose family members. The most likely route would be to allow select contacts. If that’s how it goes forward, it would technically be similar to the discontinued selected contacts option, so that it might place some limitations.

The other way could be to allow other users to be added to your Google One family plan, but doing so would limit it only to people who pay for extra storage on Drive. That’s why it would be much less likely.

Since we haven’t yet discovered the feature in the app, we can’t say how it would work, but we’ll let you know as soon as we have the slightest clue.