New evidence reveals that Google is working on some form of NFC-based contact sharing on Android, similar to iPhone’s “NameDrop,” but it’s very early days.
Apple introduced “NameDrop” on iPhone as a part of iOS 17, with the feature able to share your contact card via NFC. It’s a clever feature with a really cool UI, and it seems Google is starting to work on its own version.
The folks at Android Authority shared findings from the latest Google Play Services v25.44.32 beta which reveals a new “Contact Exchange Activity.” Also referred to as a “Gesture Exchange,” parts of the code point to this being an NFC-based feature given the presence of the “ndef” indicator, which is short for “NFC Data Exchange Format.”
The handful of code bits that point to this don’t really tell us much, but manually launching one of the activities led to a pop-up UI that shows either the ability to share your contact information or that you’ve received someone else’s contact information and can save it to your contacts.
There are still a lot of questions here, including what you as the user need to do to trigger the action, and how the contact is actually shared – NFC seems feasible, but the AA report admits it could use other options such as Bluetooth.
But those are the kinds of details we never get when features like these are uncovered so early – arguably too early for the way they’re hyped up – so we’ll just have to wait and see. Simiarly, there’s also absolutely no indication of when this might arrive. With the UI barely being built out, it’s certainly hard to say it might be “coming soon.”
Then again, the bigger question is whether or not anyone would want to even use this feature. While Apple made a big deal about “NameDrop” on its debut, it seems to have largely been forgotten about by iPhone users. The feature’s debut also led to privacy concerns from the general public.
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