Web Share Target API isn't a good experience on Android either.

Partly because it only works if the user visits your site with Chrome for Android (even Chromium browsers don't work).

And partly because receiving a share unrecoverably takes over whatever the user is doing. If the user opens something from your PWA (an external link, another app) and then shares back into your PWA, whatever they were looking at gets killed and your PWA navigates to the share target.

I'm building a web app built around sharing and I'm going to have to wrap it in an Android app solely to get around this.

If you just want something for yourself, you can set that up with a Shortcut and the "Get contents of url" action. You can then configure the shortcut to be available in the Share page so you could then easily share links/whatever to your self hosted app

Web Share Target API (manifest: share_target) - it allows a website to specify itself as a share target. Of course, it's not yet supported on iOS.

This is not a web standard. Google wrote the specification and only Google have implemented it. It’s an unofficial draft:

> Editors:

> Matt Giuca (Google Inc.)

> Eric Willigers (Google Inc.)

> Status of This Document

> This specification was published by the Web Incubator Community Group. It is not a W3C Standard nor is it on the W3C Standards Track

— https://w3c.github.io/web-share-target/level-2/

Firefox doesn’t implement it either: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1476515

Apple raised a concern about spoofing which seems to have gone unaddressed by the spec authors in over a year: https://github.com/w3c/web-share-target/issues/109

This may yet turn into a web standard given more work, but please don’t hold up a Google spec. implemented only by Google as if it were a part of the web platform that Apple are late in implementing.

The only relevant browsers on mobile are google's and apple's, and (modern) web standards are created by enough popular browsers implementing them. Literally all it would take for this to be a reliable web standard would be apple choosing to implement it.

Well until that point, and until it’s ratified as one, it’s not a web standard, so you can’t get disappointed that nobody else implements it.

You can apply that logic to literally anything Google thinks up. Google writes something in a spec and no matter how stupid, insecure, or privacy violating it is, by this logic Apple is now falling behind and holding the web back because all it would take to make it a standard is for Apple to do what Google wants. Why are you so keen to hand the web platform entirely over to Google?

this is foreseen to come eventually, the APIs are there https://web.dev/articles/web-share?hl=en