I’m constantly worried that on the web platform we are creating unintended silos by making it harder to get data in and out of web sites and apps, more importantly I worry that the data only flows one way: from the web to apps, because apps can be in all the places that users expect them to be on their devices.

I was pretty pleased that Chrome started to work on the Web Share Target API that complements the work on navigator.share. Where navigator.share lets you share information out of your web site to any app on the users device that can receive ‘shares’ (Intent.ACTION_SEND in Android parlance), the Web Share Target lets your web site (or PWA) say ‘I want to play in that game too’.

I’m pretty pleased to say that this work is now available in Chrome Canary on Android.

The Web Share Target API is a small API that you define in your Web App Manifest. If you have ever used registerProtocolHandler you will see that it’s not a million miles away — you define a URL template that has a number of variables in that will be substituted when the user invokes the action.

First you create an ‘object’ property called share_target that contains one property called url_template that has the path that should be opened when the user chooses our service. On Android, you can use the three substitution names called:

• {title} - equivelent to .title on navigator.share API, or Intent.EXTRA_SUBJECT from an Android Intent.
• {text} - equivelent to .text on navigator.share API, or Intent.EXTRA_TEXT from an Android Intent.
• {url} - equivelent to .url on navigator.share API, or the raw data from an Android Intent.

You can try this today by installing Twitter’s PWA. Twitter’s manifest is below:

{
    ...
    "name": "Twitter Lite",
    "share_target": {
        "url_template": "compose/tweet?title={title}&text={text}&url={url}"
    },
    ...
}

Right now there are some limitations:

• You can only have one per manifest, that means in Twitter’s case they can’t have a ‘Share to DM’.
• There are some extensions proposed such as a service worker event called navigator.actions that will be triggered without having to open up a UI surface, but they are not implemented yet.
• You can only share ‘text’, which means if you want to share a Blob of data you need to save that with a URL that would then be shared out.
• It only works on Android.
• You have to have the PWA installed, so you can’t do a drive by registration of a share target. When Chrome generates a ‘Web APK’ it now looks at the share_target to see if it should register the native <intent-filter>.
• It’s not standardised yet as part of the manifest spec. :/ oh - and it also might change.

Limitations aside, this is a rather amazing addition to the web platform that is the start of breaking down the huge barriers that the web has with regards to integration on the host platforms.

If you want to track updates to this API, check out Chrome Status.

Paul Kinlan

Trying to make the web and developers better.