Simply tap on the slider control by “Use Nearby Share” and it’ll turn on.

Once you’ve done that, you’ll want to enable nearby share. I find this to be useful, so encourage you to Agree to the terms and add your phone number to your Android account. Easy enough, tap anywhere in the green box and you’ll get a confirmation box: If you’re configuring nearby share for the first time it might prompt you to add or verify your phone number, as shown.

Tap on “ Nearby Share” from the list and you’ll jump directly to where you can enable the feature, or find it’s already enabled and you never realized: The first entry is what you seek: “Nearby Share”, and it’s (surprise) part of Google Play services. I can tell you how to dig through Settings to get to the right spot, but let’s use the Settings search instead since it’s soooo helpful. HOW TO SET UP YOUR ANDROID PHONE FOR NEARBY SHARE Let’s go through them one-by-one! If you want to add Chromebook support too, check out: Use Nearby Share with Chromebooks. There are three parts to this tutorial, therefore how to set up your Android device to work with Nearby Share, how to share something with another device that’s, well, nearby, and how to accept shares and receive whatever’s being sent.

They don’t even need to be in your Contacts list (though I generally recommend against being open to any and all data shared from unknown users, but I’ll get back to that in a bit). The end result is that once you get it all set up and configured, Nearby Share is great and works as long as you’re within Bluetooth range of the other device (typically about 10 meters). Google’s Android team watched that experience and slowly planned out its competitor to AirDrop, Nearby Share, and quietly added it to Android a short while ago.

Shortcuts: Set up nearby share | send a photo with nearby share | receive a nearby share transferĪpple has taken a long time getting its AirDrop feature to work, and even then sometimes it’s there to make a transfer between Apple devices (iPhone to iPhone, iPhone to Mac, etc) easy, while other times it’s non-functional.

Nearby share between android and iphone