Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Quick Share recently implemented support for sharing via QR code.
- Right now, you have to tap a button to manually request a QR code before sharing.
- Google is testing a change to the Quick Share interface that includes the QR code by default.
When you’ve got something on your phone that you want to send to your friend’s phone, there’s probably no easier path forward than by using Quick Share. Over the course of several months last year, we checked out Google’s progress towards adding QR-code-based sharing to Quick Share before finally seeing it go official in December. That was already a great upgrade to get, but now we’re wondering if Google might be about to lean even harder into QR codes for Quick Share as we spot some further development progress.
An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
So far, when you’ve gone to establish a Quick Share transfer, the service has prioritized wireless discovery; it first tries to detect devices visible to it, and offers those as sharing targets. If a device isn’t yet set up properly to appear there, though, it might be fastest to just initiate things with a QR code, and you can tap a button to quickly generate one.
That works just fine, but after installing Google Play Services 25.10.31 beta, we were able to activate an in-development change to the Quick Share interface that eliminates the need to tap that button to make a QR code. Instead, it’s just there from the get-go, present on the Quick Share screen beneath the nearby device window.
Frankly, this makes perfect sense. Google had to shrink the “Quick Share” label down a little bit to make everything fit, but the old interface was honestly wasting a lot of space. With a bit of reorganization, there’s plenty of room for both nearby device discovery and a ready-to-scan QR code, all on the same screen.
Right now, this new look is still not publicly accessible, but as far as we’re concerned, Google shouldn’t waste any more time thinking about pushing this change live. Quick Share is one of Android’s best (if most underappreciated) tools, and committing all the way to its newfound QR code support makes all the sense in the world.