Google Hangouts has been updated for Android that brings a much desired feature for those who use Hangouts a lot: Direct Share. For those who aren’t familiar with what I’m referring to, Direct Share allows you to share content from another app directly to someone on Hangouts. To this point, if you wanted to share something, it was difficult and involved a fair bit of cutting and pasting in some cases. That isn’t a big deal for those who don’t use the app much but for power users, it was a time consuming step. That, for the most part, is gone now.
If you are in an app where you want to share content, you don’t have to do anything special. Just tap the Share icon as always but at the top of the share shade, you will notice you now have
Google Hangouts Direct Share
Hangouts contacts there to share content with using just a tap. That top part of the Share shade is dynamic based on your most recent contacts but you can always go down on the shad and find the app to share with someone else.
Direct Share is not new and in fact many other apps use it. If you look at my screen capture, you’ll note that I have Twitter users on my dynamic section of the Share shade. Twitter has been taking advantage of Direct Share for a couple of releases now so in a way, Google is playing catch up a bit with Hangouts.
The update has been rolling out in the Google Play Store for the past several days so most users should now have this feature. If not, it should be to you via an OTA update very shortly.
