Chrome Sharing Hub

"The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

Update 3/10/2021: Chrome 89 expired the chrome-sharing-hub flag. To get it back (probably just temporarily), open chrome://flags/ and enable Temporarily unexpire M88 flags.

Sharing on Android

Share functionality on Android has been something of a mess, in that picking a Share target has been clumsy and painful. With Android 10, Google made significant improvements, although it's buggy in that the wrong target app is sometimes launched if you select too quickly (a problem that persists in Android 11).*

Meanwhile, possibly due to that clumsiness, the Chrome team has been working on its own Share solution, called Sharing Hub, and has now rolled it out widely.

What's Wrong with Sharing Hub?

The Sharing Hub provides an array of sharing targets at the bottom of the screen, which sounds like a good idea, except there are a number of problems:

• The array of targets cannot be customized (as of this writing at least). That's only fine if you just want the sharing target choices made by Google.
• If you want some other sharing target, you have to first scroll to the right, then select the More overflow menu to open the standard Android Share menu.
• Opening the standard Android Share menu thus takes two extra selections, which is clumsy and painful, especially if you do it frequently.
• Opening the standard Android Share menu also takes more time that slows things down, making it doubly clumsy and painful.

How To Disable Sharing Hub

Fortunately, Chrome Sharing Hub can be disabled, leaving just the standard Android Share menu:

1. In Chrome, open
   chrome://flags/#chrome-sharing-hub
2. Change the option to
   Disabled

* Work-around for the wrong target app bug is to scroll the standard Android Share menu up before making a selection.