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I agree with both you and the parent from a principles perspective. There's no reason sharing on the web has to be somehow limited to whatever the website autho
by NightMKoder 6y ago
I agree with both you and the parent from a principles perspective. There's no reason sharing on the web has to be somehow limited to whatever the website author chose to support.
My problem is that this just isn't a pragmatic choice right now. The chicken-and-egg problem is somewhat true, but the carrot was already there for web devs - iOS and Android implement web share. And it's an excellent UX - better than anything you can make yourself.
The problem with the desktop share experience is that it is strictly worse than putting 2-3 social buttons & copy link for 95% of people. Neither Facebook nor WhatsApp support the share target API right now (quick post-edit: Twitter does though). Even if they did, there's another hurdle [1]:
To register your app as a share target, it needs to meet Chrome's installability criteria. In addition, before a user can share to your app, they must add it to their home screen.
So, again, pragmatically what people are going to start doing is - change from "if (navigation.share)" to "if (navigator.share && isMobile)". And I think that sucks - there will have to be another slow-moving wave of change once the desktop share is "good enough" to enable for everyone.
[1] - https://web.dev/web-share-target/ https://web.dev/web-share-target/