It amuses me that the author talked about the Share menu as if it's a special case behavior developed in. Rather, the Share menu is a direct consequence of what

It amuses me that the author talked about the Share menu as if it's a special case behavior developed in. Rather, the Share menu is a direct consequence of what may well be Android's biggest strength aside from openness: the Activities and Intents model for UI development. When an application wants to share something, it flags a Share Intent, which any other application is free to respond to. You can see the same behavior with other kinds of Intents, such as the Intent associated with clicking links in a web browser. The YouTube app, for instance, consumes browse Intents whose URLs match YouTube URLs, so that the UI gracefully hands off the Activity from the web browser to the YouTube app. The use of Intents means that applications can integrate with each other, even if they are not aware of each other's existences. There's a lot of power and extensibility to that model, to be sure!