Sharing is caring

Wouldn't it be grand to click a button and have your mobile's native share dialog come up?
This used to take funky third party js widgets, or registering for all the various site api's individual; I remember it could take a week to get it right with SEO back in the golden days.

Well friends fear no more check out the webshare api

Now hypothetically say you have a fullscreened progressive web app, looks slick don't it? The problem though is the missing url bar.

Example:

Here's your solution in the form of a method. One caveat is this must be called on a user action like click.

share() {
      if (navigator.share) {
        navigator
          .share({
            title: 'title',
            text: 'description',
            url: `url`
          })
          .catch(err => {
            console.log(`Couldn't share because of`, err.message);
          });
      } else {
        console.log("web share not supported");
      }
    }

<a class="show-mobile" href="#" @click.prevent="share">🔗 share</a>

Oh one more thing, this is only supported on mobile devices. I find this solution better than the user agent sniffing dark arts.

.show-mobile {
    display: none;
}
@media (pointer: coarse) {
  .show-mobile {
    display: inline-block;
  }
}

Why not fire up your cellular device and give it a try with this article, how meta would that be?

Comments

[Robin Plötzwich]

What would be the alternative implementation?
Say I press share on a device that doesn't support the webshare api?

Anyways, thanks for article, I think this will be helpful in the future.

[Greg, The JavaScript Whisperer]

One way is native both ios and android have share built in android-developers.googleblog.com/...

The other is to add each icon of a service you wanted to share to (and you have to guess what the user has) and code each with the various api's developers.facebook.com/docs/plugi... and twitter would be different, tedius. it's what we did in the 00's