Web Share API test

Jeremy Keith
1 min readApr 10, 2020

This was originally posted on my own site.

Remember a while back I wrote about some odd behaviour with the Web Share API in Safari on iOS?

When the share() method is triggered, iOS provides multiple ways of sharing: Messages, Airdrop, email, and so on. But the simplest option is the one labelled “copy”, which copies to the clipboard.

Here’s the thing: if you’ve provided a text parameter to the share() method then that’s what’s going to get copied to the clipboard—not the URL.

That’s a shame. Personally, I think the url field should take precedence.

Tess filed a bug soon after, which was very gratifying to see.

Now Phil has put together a test case:

  1. Share URL, title, and text
  2. Share URL and title
  3. Share URL and text

Very handy! The results (using the “copy” to clipboard action) are somewhat like rock, paper, scissors:

  • URL beats title,
  • text beats URL,
  • nothing beats text.

So it’s more like rock, paper, high explosives.

This was originally posted on my own site.

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Jeremy Keith

A web developer and author living and working in Brighton, England. Everything I post on Medium is a copy — the originals are on my own website, adactio.com