Can I register a progressive web application as an Android sharing option?

Question

General question for beginners.

Tl; dr - Can I register a progressive web application as an Android sharing option?

In Android, we can “share” things with other installed Android applications. For example, let's say I have Chrome for Android and the Google+ app installed on my Android device. I can share the website I’m browsing in Chrome on Google+ by going to the Chromes hamburger menu → Share ... → Google+ (with a list of other installed native apps). Can I register a progressive web application in this list of installed applications? If so, can you show me some code examples or labs? If not, is this a feature in the progressive web app or Androids roadmap?

Answer 1

No, unfortunately, this is not possible.

The intent system is mainly useful for native applications.

The only thing you can do is create URLs that are parsed as intentions on the Android device and transferred to your own applications, but cannot go the other way around, i.e. from a native application -> trigger intent -> web applications. The main obstacle to this is that the web application cannot indicate that it can handle the intent (made in native applications via AndroidManifest).

Answer 2

This is possible soon with the target api web resource.

https://github.com/WICG/web-share-target

On chrome, it is under development https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5662315307335680

Find more information about it here.

• https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!msg/blink-dev/_oUskZTzQxg/TwReQ2npBgAJ
• https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=668389&desc=2

Answer 3

Here's a web access API that offers common features.