Google’s Quick Share has been an important part of Android for a few years now, but it still has a few hidden tricks, including the ability to trigger sharing by simply tapping the phone you want to share to.
Yesterday, a fresh One UI 9 leak showcased a (seemingly) new “Tap to Share” gesture planned for Samsung’s upcoming Android 17 update this summer, with prior leaks having pointed to this feature coming to Android devices at large. One reader, @LBPHeretic on Twitter, tagged us this morning to draw our attention to a semi-secret function buried within Quick Share that basically allows the old Android Beam-esque tap to share functionality to continue working.
This isn’t new, to be clear — this functionality has existed within Quick Share since it was actually referred to as Nearby Share. A comment on three-year-old Reddit thread explains it perfectly: if you tap the backs of two Android devices together while one is attempting to share a file through Quick Share, it should automatically begin the transfer process, just as Android Beam worked way back in the day. Believe it or not, tech publications — including 9to5Google — actually reported on this way back in 2021, but considering how fast this space moves, it’s understandable that a relatively obscure file sharing trick would, you know, eventually disappear from the public consciousness.
I will suggest, however, another reason people might be forgetting about it: it doesn’t work great, at least on my end. Sharing between devices from the same manufacturer is easy enough — I transferred several images back and forth between a Pixel 10 and Pixel 10a — but I have yet to get either device to recognize my Galaxy S26, and vice versa. In both cases, Quick Share could see the other phone, but I needed to interact with the actual Quick Share UI to start the process. Without a clear visual distinction, it’s tricky to troubleshoot what might be happening in the background to prevent this process, or if it’s really as simple as mismatching OEMs.
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But hey, your mileage may vary. If you didn’t already know that the bones of Android Beam still exist on your device, give it a try next time you need to transfer a file. Even with this existing system, it seems like tapping to share is about to get a whole lot more obvious if and when it presumably arrives on One UI 9 — and other Android devices — later this year.
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