Share Text on Facebook from Android App via ACTION_SEND

Question

I have an Android app and it supports sending text via other apps. It therefore uses the ACTION_SEND intent and the EXTRA_TEXT field. The chooser presents me with all apps that can handle such an intent. Those are Twitter, Email, ... and Facebook. But when I select Facebook it opens the browser and goes to the following page:

http://m.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=mytext

It shows my text and the submit button. But when I press the submit button nothing happens. The page just loads again. I think maybe it is only possible to send URLs via the Facebook App. Could that be?

Did anyone manage to send text via ACTION_SEND through the Facebook Android app?

Answer 1

To make the Share work with the facebook app, you only need to have suply at least one link:

Intent intent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_SEND); intent.setType("text/plain"); intent.putExtra(Intent.EXTRA_TEXT, "Wonderful search engine http://www.google.fr/"); startActivity(Intent.createChooser(intent, "Share with")); 

This will show the correct sharing window but when you click on share, nothing happends (I also tried with the official Twitter App, it does not work).

The only way I found to make the Facebook app sharing work is to share only a link with no text:

Intent intent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_SEND); intent.setType("text/plain"); intent.putExtra(Intent.EXTRA_TEXT, "http://www.google.fr/"); startActivity(Intent.createChooser(intent, "Share with")); 

It will show the following window and the Share button will work:

Apparently it automatically takes an image and text from the link to populate the share.

If you want to share only text, you will have to use the facebook api: https://github.com/facebook/facebook-android-sdk

Answer 2

06/2013 :

• This is a bug from Facebook, not your code
• Facebook will NOT fix this bug, they say it is "by design" that they broke the Android share system : https://developers.facebook.com/bugs/332619626816423
• use the SDK or share only URL.
• Tips: you could cheat a little using the web page title as text for the post.