We’ve been hard at work upgrading Shareable Apps to take advantage of the latest features in iOS and Android.
And have gone live with another feature.
We’ve integrated Shareable Apps with the new native Share Sheet ability of iOS 12.2+ and Android Chrome 61+.
This comes in two parts
1. Share with Contacts
Tapping the ‘Share with contacts’ tab in the Share panel now brings up the native Share Sheet for iOS 12.2+ and Android Chrome 61+ users.
There’s nothing you need to do to get this upgrade, every app on our platform has already been updated.
If your app users are on an older operating system, the old behaviour that uses our custom built sharing still applies.
2. Share Sheet behaviour for links
Shareable Apps now use the native Share Sheet in iOS 12.2 and Android Chrome 61 and above.
Previously, if an app user wanted to share a link, for example to a PDF or video or music file from within the app, here’s what they’d have to do:
Tap on file link in app > link opens in browser > hit share button > share sheet is triggered
NOW, thanks to some new capabilities of the most recent operating systems we’ve been able to utilise, the new behaviour is:
Tap on file link in app > share sheet is triggered
It’s so much simpler and easier for your customers and clients to do things like share or download the content you want them to access outside of your app.
To make your app links do this involves manually inserting some html code. This is pretty simple as coding goes, but if you’re not familiar at all with html you may want to get some assistance.
On a page that can take html code, eg ‘custom page’, simply add the following attributes to an <a> tag:
sa-share="true", sa-share-url="https://url/to/file/or/link" sa-share-text="Title to appear in Share Sheet"
Replace with your desired file and share sheet text details. Here’s how this would look in a live example:
<a sa-share="true" sa-share-url="https://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tests/xhtml/testfiles/resources/pdf/dummy.pdf" sa-share-text="Share the PDF" href="https://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tests/xhtml/testfiles/resources/pdf/dummy.pdf">Share the PDF</a>
If you simply pasted the above into your app, when you click on this link, you’ll get a native share sheet open up.
If there’s a feature you want, shoot us an email and we’ll assess it for the pipeline!
