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And why should the developer have to care if I want to send something via Gmail, Skype, or carrier pigeon? As long as Android abstracts the data properly within the Intent, the target app should be irrelevant.

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That's true, but the Android approach for accomplishing it is kind of horrible. For one, far too many apps respond to message types that don't really make sense to me. I don't know that this problem is avoidable with freedom, but the lists of available apps for any particular action are often long and very confusing.

I have witnessed this confusion with users, and it really hurts the platform in a lot of cases, IMO.

I can select one to be the default "always", but this doesn't work well either. If there are five applications that can receive a particular intent, my selection of "always" will be lost every single time that ANY of those five applications are updated. So, in practice, my "Always" selection typically only lasts a couple of weeks.

There HAS to be a better way.

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