How to Fix the iOS Activity Sheet
In a post on Medium, Greg Raiz, CEO of app development agency Raizlabs, explains how Apple could improve the Activity sheet in iOS (it’s commonly called the Share sheet, but that’s misleading because it frequently contains actions unrelated to sharing). He points out that the seldom-used AirDrop takes up far too much space, the app with which you want to share is often buried, and there are too many customization options. Raiz presents a cleaner and simpler Actions sheet that distinguishes between actions within the current app and sharing data with other apps. It also prioritizes app actions and orders share apps by frequency of use. We hope Apple redesigns the Activity sheet along these lines for iOS 11.
I think he makes a couple of very good points.
I have struggled with share sheets myself despite the fact that I don't use them that often.
It's a bit surprising that a company like Apple that for so many years set the benchmark in terms of usability and efficiency, has managed to get the share sheets so wrong. As Greg Raiz points out, it doesn't take a whole lot to make them potentially so much better. Most surprisingly, most of the changes are not fancy tech or radical novelty, just a bit of common sense.
While this issue with Apple is a bit unsettling, it's somewhat reassuring to see that their user base still has skilled people that dedicate their time to showing up how things can be improved.
It's not called Share Sheet, it's Activity Sheet.
Interesting! You're right, when I dive into the Apple developer docs, it is (at least now) called an Activity view. However, Apple seems quite inconsistent as to whether the button that invokes it is a Share button or an Action button.