14 DAY TRIAL // AirDrop has long been a feature that many praised for how convenient it made content sharing between Apple devices, and now it looks like Google doesn’t want to be ignored either.
While Nearby Share is already available on Android, Google is targeting an expansion that has the potential of making this feature a widely-used feature for everyone owning a device running its mobile operating system.
More specifically, Nearby Share could expand beyond Android devices and also go live on Windows, Linux, macOS, and Chrome OS, all thanks to Chrome integration.
Already part of Chrome Canary
In other words, Nearby Share will be part of the Google Chrome browser feature lineup, taking care of the whole sharing thing regardless of the platform. According to a recent discovery shared by Dinsan Francis of ChromeStory, the feature has already been implemented in the Canary version of Google Chrome, which means it’s currently in a rather advanced testing phase.
Oddly enough, if it lands on Windows, Nearby Share will have to compete against Microsoft’s very own similar feature called… Nearby Sharing. Announced with the release of Windows 10 version 1803, and offered to users in all feature updates ever since, Nearby Sharing makes it possible for Windows 10 users to share documents, photos, videos, links to websites, and basically anything that can be shared right from the Action Center as long as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are enabled.
Google is yet to announce the expansion of Nearby Share to other platforms, so for the time being, it’s all just a test that the company isn’t ready to confirm.
Yet given the advanced development stage that the feature has reached since it’s already being tested in public Canary builds of Google Chrome, there’s a good chance that we’re not very far from an official announcement in this regard.