iOS UIActivity Sharing

👉 Overview

👀 What ?

iOS UIActivity Sharing is a feature in iOS devices that allows users to share content such as text, images, URLs, and more, from their app to other apps or services. Essentially, it's a bridge connecting your app to other services on a user's device.

🧐 Why ?

Understanding iOS UIActivity Sharing is crucial for both users and developers. For users, it enhances the user experience by simplifying the sharing process across different apps. For developers, it provides a standard way to implement sharing features in their apps without needing to create custom interfaces for every possible service.

⛏️ How ?

To utilize iOS UIActivity Sharing, developers need to use the UIActivityViewController class, which is part of the UIKit framework. This class presents a view controller that can be used to offer various services from your app. The services, known as activities, can include standard services such as copying items to the pasteboard, posting content to social media sites, sending items via email or SMS, and more. You can also define custom activities for your app.

⏳ When ?

iOS UIActivity Sharing was introduced in iOS 6 and has since become a standard feature in iOS app development. It's commonly used in apps that deal with media or data that users might want to share or export.

⚙️ Technical Explanations

iOS UIActivity Sharing is a powerful feature that enables inter-app communication in iOS devices. It is centered around the UIActivityViewController class, a part of Apple's UIKit framework.

The UIActivityViewController class is initialized with the data that users wish to share. This data, known as activity items, can be of various types such as text strings, images, or URLs. When initialized, a new UIActivityViewController object is created and configured with an array of these activity items.

The UIActivityViewController then takes these activity items and analyzes them. Based on the types of data present, it determines which activities or services can handle the data. This is an important aspect of UIActivity Sharing, as different services are capable of handling different types of data. For instance, a text messaging app may only be able to handle text strings and not images.

Once the compatible activities are determined, they are presented to the user in an activity view controller. This controller provides a standardized interface for sharing, saving, and performing actions on data. It offers a consistent user experience across different apps and takes care of many complexities involved in inter-app communication.

When a user selects an activity from the presented options, the UIActivityViewController invokes the corresponding method of the selected service and passes the data to it. This selected service could be another app or an internal iOS service like copying to the clipboard or saving to the camera roll.

In conclusion, iOS UIActivity Sharing is a feature that enhances the user experience by simplifying the process of sharing data between apps and services. It provides a standardized way for developers to offer sharing capabilities in their apps, freeing them from the need to create custom interfaces or protocols for every possible service.

Here's a simple example of how to implement iOS UIActivity Sharing.

1. Initialize the data to be shared: Consider you have a String and an Image that you wish to share. You can initialize these as follows:

let textToShare = "Hello, World!"
let imageToShare = UIImage(named: "exampleImage")

1. Initialize UIActivityViewController: The data to be shared, or the activity items, are passed in an array to the UIActivityViewController initializer.

let activityViewController = UIActivityViewController(activityItems: [textToShare, imageToShare], applicationActivities: nil)

1. Present the UIActivityViewController: You can present the UIActivityViewController just like any other view controller.

self.present(activityViewController, animated: true, completion: nil)

When you run this code, iOS will present a menu with all the potential sharing options that can handle the data types you've passed. These might include messaging apps, email, social media apps, and more.

For example, if you're sharing text, it might show options like Messages, Mail, Notes. If you're sharing an image, it might show options like Photos, Mail, Messages, and social media apps.

The user can select one of these, and iOS will take care of passing the data to the selected service.