Google’s Gesture Exchange Could Finally Give Android Its Own NameDrop

For years, sharing a simple phone number or email address between two people has been weirdly clunky. You either spell it out, send a message in a chat app, or scan a QR code while everyone pretends this is normal in 2025.

Apple tried to fix this with NameDrop in iOS 17, letting iPhone users exchange details by just bringing their devices close together. Now Google is finally preparing its own answer for Android.

Hidden inside a recent version of Google Play Services, developers have spotted a feature currently labeled Gesture Exchange, with an internal activity called Contact Exchange. In practical terms, this looks like Google’s take on NameDrop for Android: you move two compatible phones close to each other, confirm what you want to share, and the contact details jump across almost instantly.

The interface shown in early screenshots is surprisingly straightforward. On the first screen, you choose exactly what you are comfortable sharing: your profile photo, phone number, email address, or a combination of those. There is also a Receive only mode for those moments when you want to grab someone else’s info without giving out your own, which is very on-brand for privacy-conscious or just cautious users.

On the receiving side, the experience is designed to be just as low-friction. The contact card appears on screen, and with a single tap you can save it directly to your address book. From that same view, you can immediately start a video call or fire off a text, so the feature does not just copy the data, it nudges you toward actually using it right away.

Technically, the system relies on NFC, but most signs suggest NFC will mainly handle the initial handshake, confirming that the two phones are physically close and that both users actually want to connect. After that, the heavy lifting is likely passed to a faster channel such as Bluetooth or Wi-Fi Direct, similar to how modern sharing systems avoid pushing large payloads through NFC alone.

For longtime Android fans, this all feels like a modern reincarnation of Android Beam, the old touch-to-share feature that Google quietly retired years ago. The difference now is that the company seems focused on polishing the user experience, tightening privacy controls, and integrating the flow more deeply into the system rather than leaving it as a forgotten submenu option that nobody remembers exists.

There is one big question hanging over Gesture Exchange, though: will it talk to iPhones? Right now, there is no sign of cross-platform support, and plenty of users are already rolling their eyes at yet another feature that only works inside one ecosystem. If your friends or colleagues are split between iOS and Android, a one-sided sharing trick will inevitably feel limited. On the other hand, the global market is still dominated by Android phones, so even an Android-only solution will matter for hundreds of millions of people who never touch an iPhone.

The branding is also still in flux. The internal names Gesture Exchange and Contact Exchange sound more like engineering labels than something Google would put on a marketing slide. It is easy to imagine the company eventually folding this into its existing Quick Share branding, with fans already joking about names like Quickshare drop. Whatever it ends up being called, the real value will be in how seamlessly it appears when two people meet, tap their phones together, and exchange details without fumbling through menus.

For now, Gesture Exchange is clearly still under development, with the current implementation focused on clean, fast contact sharing. But the foundations Google is laying here almost beg for expansion into broader file and content sharing later on. If Google gets the experience right, Android could finally have a polished, modern, and widely used answer to NameDrop – one that feels native to the platform instead of a rushed copy, and perhaps, over time, grows into something even more powerful.