Plans to support native share extension without detaching?

[broskoski]

See approach for implementing share extensions with RN here: https://github.com/alinz/react-native-share-extension

Curious if this is already something that's on your minds (before I attempt to implement).

Thanks for all your work thus far, really enjoying the Exponent dev experience!

[acornejo]

Not sure there is a need for an extension, the new RN supports sharing out of the box:

https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/share.html

Thus my guess is that this will come to exponent whenever the SDK upgrades to the latest RN branch.

[broskoski]

Thinking of sharing from the other direction (I.e you're on an app outside the context of an exponent app and want to share content TO the exponent app). Basically registering a react native / exponent app on the share screen.

[filipmares]

+1

[ide]

It's not at the top of our roadmap right now -- could you add an entry here? (I didn't find an existing entry when searching) https://expo.canny.io/feature-requests

[filipmares]

Just submitted. Thanks! https://expo.canny.io/feature-requests/p/ios-app-extension

[peterlandry]

I upvoted the above, but also added a roadmap request more specifically for android, as well. I didn't want it to get lost in the shuffle: https://expo.canny.io/feature-requests/p/implement-android-share-receiver

[swyxio]

keen on this too!

[DavitVosk]

Hi I am working with share extension too. Could you please advise whether the feature is already added to Expo? And if yes, please provide me some guides for using it. Thanks in advance

[isaachinman]

Hi @ide any update on this feature? I am building an app that needs to be inside the device's share menu so that data (photos, specifically) can be passed into the app from external apps, as @broskoski explained.

I would be happy to assist in a PR if you think it'd get merged.

[ide]

For updates regarding Expo APIs, see https://docs.expo.io. There is no native share extension API.

We could possibly take a PR that satisfies these nominal criteria:

• Works on both Android and iOS
• is small in scope and maintainable (this is subjective)
• Follows the Expo SDK conventions implied by existing APIs
• Objective-C and Java implementations to the standard of expo/expo code and facebook/react-native code
• A few example code snippets we can include in the integration test suite
• If the JS implementation has logic, Jest tests along with it

[isaachinman]

@ide Okay, understood. It's a shame that this is going to end up forcing me to detach. To your knowledge is there one or more existing canny feature requests that I should use, or create a new one?

[ide]

I don’t know if there is a request out for this. Please feel free to create a new one if you don’t find one after searching.

[xcarpentier]

Any PR of the share extension feature?

[brentvatne]

pr would be welcome!

[isaachinman]

Hey all - just want to point out that we aren't really actively maintaining react-native-share-extension anymore, and most (to my knowledge) production use cases are running off forks.

Share extensions are hard, and very platform-specific.

May or may not be better to start over if Expo wants to devote resources to it!

[xcarpentier]

@isaachinman do you know if there is a good starting point? (ie. specific fork or resources)
BTW differences between platforms can be managed and interfaced in front TS code, no?

I think I will start at a new expo-share-extension package on my own and propose.

[isaachinman]

@xcarpentier So in general, it is highly dependent on what it is you actually want to share. The react-native-share-extension repository originally began as a project to share text links from web browsers into other apps.

It's since evolved, but mostly via PRs and forks, to support other content like images, videos, multiple images, and so on.

I would suggest looking through this alinz/react-native-share-extension#84 PR, and taking a look at the iOS approach on master. In general, there are a lot more hoops to jump through to achieve this on iOS (unsurprisingly), and it's very hard to achieve feature parity, depending on what sort of content types you want to support.

Let me know if you have any other questions. @AndrewHenderson probably has more knowledge than I do - he might be able to help as well. Would be great to have movement in this area, as there's currently no (even remotely) easy way to do this with RN right now.

[patrickomeara]

Thanks for the great explanation @isaachinman

A share extension would be a welcome addition to expo. If anyone is tackling this problem, I'm happy to help.

[CanRau]

Any news on this?