Edit Share Menu: No Root Required

Posted by : Unknown April 09, 2014

Share Menu: No Root Required

If you’re like most Android users, your Share menu is cluttered with options you never use. Every time you want to share something, you have to scroll and hunt for the app you’re after. It doesn’t have to be that way. This is a simple tweak: It’s free, it doesn’t require you to root your device or play with any system files, and it is completely reversible. Doesn’t get much better than that.

Before and After

Here’s what we’re going for: sharemenu 1 How to Edit and Clean Up Androids Share Menu: No Root Required

To the left, you see my phone’s default Share menu. Yes, it’s nice and bright, but it’s not usable. There’s lots of wasted space between the icons, and what’s worse, it has lots and lots of entries I can’t see without scrolling. To the right is the tweaked menu: It’s dark, and there are actually less entries on the screen at one time (8 vs. 10 in the default). But these are entries I picked – apps I actually share to, and they don’t require scrolling. Note the two buttons on the bottom of the dialog; we’ll get to those in a moment.

Getting There: AppChooser

That’s the secret — a simple free app called AppChooser. Install it, and it won’t even show up in your app drawer. Instead, the first time you try to share an item after AppChooser has been installed, you’ll get this: sharemenu 2 How to Edit and Clean Up Androids Share Menu: No Root Required

sharemenu 2 How to Edit and Clean Up Androids Share Menu: No Root Required

Android will ask which app you’d like to use to complete the Share action. Choose AppChooser, and you’ll get the simple menu you see on the right. At its default state, it has all the same entries you had before, and isn’t any shorter.

Removing Stuff You Don’t Need and Sorting What’s Left

sharemenu 3 How to Edit and Clean Up Androids Share Menu: No Root Required

What’s cool about AppChooser is how elegantly it works: You don’t have a Settings dialog to wade through. To hide an app from the Share menu, just long-press it. AppChooser will prompt you to confirm, and once you do, that entry will be gone from the Share menu. Just like that. To change the sorting order, tap the bottom-left icon, and pick an ordering that works for you. Of course, in order for Frequency and History to work right, you need to be using AppChooser for some time.This simple interface has one gotcha: If you accidentally remove an app, you need to restore all apps to get it back… And then hide the ones you didn’t want one by one. This is why you should not choose to disable the “do you really want to hide?” prompt. Finally, you should know AppChooser isn’t the only game in town: