Here we’ll describe how we’ve made sharing in Windows 10 Creators Update better than ever before. In addition to refreshing the entire Share experience to make it easier to use, we’ve added new features and capabilities for developers. In this blog post, we’ll guide you through the new experience and examples of the updated Share developer features, with full source code available on GitHub.

UI redesign

First, let’s talk about the redesigned Share experience. We’ve rethought it from beginning to end – and that includes the Share icons that users will be utilizing. You can read a great blog post about the reasons and the process here, but in short, we’ve refreshed the Share icon in Windows to be more familiar and user-friendly!


Previous Windows Share icon on the left and the new Share icon on the right.

As a developer, if you use the standard icon for Share, you’ll get this change for free. The flow begins in the same way: tapping on the icon will launch the new Share dialog to show what apps can share this content.
For example, within Microsoft Edge, users can tap on the Share icon to share the web page they are currently on:


Launching Share from Microsoft Edge with the new icon

You should see the new Share dialog launch in the center of the invoking app. For developers, nothing has changed so far – the same code you used to launch Share in the past will now automatically launch the new Share dialog. This Share dialog contains some information about the content being shared as well as the apps that they can share this content with.



When the user selects an app (e.g. Mail or Facebook), it will invoke the Share target modally in the center of the app.



Store promotion

In the new Share dialog, you may have noticed there are a couple apps tagged with “Install.” In the past, we’ve noticed that users will leave the Share experience when they don’t see the app they want to share content with. To make it easier for everyone to find the right target, we’ve started promoting some of the top Share target apps in the Windows Store directly in the Share experience. For example, in the Share window displayed above, the user can choose to share with one of the installed apps (e.g. Facebook, Mail, Twitter, etc.), or download one of the suggested apps to Share (e.g. LINE, Messenger). Picking one of the promoted apps will take the user to the Store to install the corresponding app. Promoted apps are chosen based on their popularity in the user’s region (i.e. the most popular Share targets are promoted). Once the app is installed, the user will be able to share content with it. As a developer, you don’t need to do anything – the top apps will show up for your users immediately. This makes it easier than ever before for our users to share content to popular apps they might care about.

Developer features

Share Providers



We wanted to go even further to make it easier for users to find apps and targets that they might want to share with (Share Providers). Share Providers are app-defined targets that enable you, as the developer, to inject targets directly into the Share contract as part of your Share experience. This means that even if a given app or behavior is not currently available in the Windows ecosystem, you can include a Share Provider to bring this functionality to your users. Furthermore, if the app you want your users to share to is available on Windows but there are web SDKs that offer richer functionality, you can choose to include a Share Provider to build the experience you desire. As a developer, it’s easy to add one of these into Share:

Read more: New Share Experience in Windows 10 Creators Update - Building Apps for Windows

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Posted By: Brink
06 Apr 2017