Ever wanted to share a Direct Message with someone that’s not in that DM conversation? Well instead of taking a screenshot, you can share it with them using Android’s native direct share feature. What makes this special is that you can send it to users in another app. If you have used a device with Marshmallow, then you know that the top row in the direct share pop up shows your four most shared contacts, whether they are in Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp or another application, followed by other apps you can share with below that. So if there’s a DM you want to share with someone on Hangouts, you can do so now with the Direct Share feature. It’s pretty interesting, but hard to say how useful it’ll be for many users.
This comes shortly after Twitter added a Share button for Tweets to allow you to send them as DM’s. It’s all part of Twitter looking to find ways to keep users on the platform longer and doing more on the platform. With their user-base growth having stalled recently, this is the alternative for Twitter. Getting users to spend more time on Twitter. It’s also been interesting to see that Twitter has been using some of Android’s native features and API’s for some of these new features. Obviously this direct share feature isn’t available on iOS, but it may have something similar in the near future.
Twitter has been unveiling quite a few new features as of late, both for mobile and the web. They are still behind Facebook for being the largest social media platform around, but looking to change that. Twitter recently celebrated their tenth birthday, and new CEO Jack Dorsey is making sure that the service will be around for another decade. Recently, a leak of a new Twitter app for Android showed a much more material design looking app coming to Android. Now this may or may not come to fruition, but it’s definitely an interesting design that many would love to see available for Android. Especially with third-party apps running out of tokens, like Fenix most recently.