[RyanZAG]

From the footnotes:

> Android has intents which are a big step in the right direction. With a few tweaks to user experience they could solve this problem on the platform.

What tweaks would 'solve this problem'? As far as I can tell, Android intents work flawlessly for transferring content between apps. I can click an attachment on an email, open it in an editor, make changes, and then share that file back on a social network or another email. Each step taking only two taps. The speed of downloading attachments could do with some work in most cases, but that's just a hardware issue and will probably be far faster in another generation or two of hardware.

I have a feeling the author has never really used an Android device much? Or am I missing some key piece missing from intents?

[rcoh]

An Android phone is my primary device. A few key issues for me:

1. No app discovery -- I want to find out about apps that can work with my content.

2. Action curation -- I want to see the actions that other people think are most useful when dealing with my content.

3. No "Return" actions -- eg. The context knowledge necessary to reply to the same message, or overwrite an existing file.

4. Cross device and cross OS: If this is done right, there's no reason for the action to be bound to just one device or even one person.

[RyanZAG]

1. When you initiate any action that would use an intent in Android, you get that selection popup window that let's you choose any app that can handle that intent. So I think there is already app discovery? Unless you mean something like Play Store integration into Android itself, in which you can view applications on Google Play that can handle that intent. That is pretty interesting and should be do-able even without Google's intervention with just a database of Google Play apps... I looked around but didn't find anything. Might be a cool project to try.

2. Each app defines what intents it can handle, so I don't think curation is necessary. The app select popup window is already curating that for you?

3. This context knowledge is provided inside every intent. Not all apps choose to use it, though. In some cases I'd guess the sandbox would get in the way as well. I'm not sure how much practical value this would have anyway? Can you explain it a bit more?

4. There is nothing stopping Apple from adopting Android intents, but obviously they won't. This is a 'pie in the sky' suggestion that won't happen for the same reason there is more than one flavour of Linux. It's like asking why you can't pipe results from your unix system to a Windows system - it just won't happen for political reasons.

[jordanthoms]

A few issues I have with android intents (Overall I love them):

- They are sometimes vague, and apps often advertise support for many intents they can't actually handle sanely. Trying to setup an email intent which actually only shows email clients is an example of this. The UX of showing a list of many apps which are not really good choices is pretty bad. I think the blame for this is largely on the apps themselves for not being more specific in their intent filters, but it still reflects badly on the platform.

- It loses the default choices on a regular basis. Updating an app which supports that intent and/or installing a new one seems to invalidate the default choice, which is really annoying. Especially in cases where you have e.g. installed a 3rd party browser, and now every time you click a link you have to choose which one to use.

- Once you have selected a default, you can't choose to use another one without digging through settings and clearing them for the app which has the default action set. Something like the right click and open with which we have on desktop operating systems would be great.

[rcoh]

1. I'm thinking of it being connected with Google Play.

2. Once you've increased the scope beyond the apps on the device, work needs to be done to show the most relevant and useful actions.

3. Enabling flows like:

- Take file from one app, edit in another app, save back over the original file

- Take an email attachment, edit / modify in another app, then reply back on the same thread

4. But there is no reason a third party can't come in and make it happen.

[RyanZAG]

Good points. The problem with creating this is that it would need system level access for each OS, I think. Adding these kind of intents into Windows or OSX would be easy enough, and adding them into browsers should be possible too (Firefox, at least, would be open to it). I can't see how you'd ever get this added into iOS. Google is unlikely to extend intents in this way for Android as it would break backwards compatibility also.

I think the technical challenge may be too great for current gen OSes and browsers? Perhaps we will see a system like this arise on the 'next battlefield', whatever that might be.

Here's hoping someone works it out. The system itself is not that difficult to understand or to implement, it's the logistics of it that would be difficult and (by definition) need a lot more collaboration between corps than currently.

Web Intents [1] are a push in this direction, but adoption is extremely slow and does not look like it is going to take place.

[1] http://webintents.org/