Bring two Android phones close together and, for a brief moment, a neat halo of animation appears where the screens meet. It looks like the "you're doing it right" cue iPhone users get with NameDrop — except on Android the animation is the only thing that works right now.
Google Play Services 25.49.31 beta contains the first public-facing evidence that Android is building a NameDrop-style contact exchange. Reporters were able to trigger the effect between a Pixel 9 and a POCO F6: tap the two phones together and a short, full-screen visual pulses around the top-half bezels. No contact card pops up. No permission bottom sheet appears. The handshaking animation is there to signal intent, but the actual transfer mechanics are still under construction.
Animation first, transfer later
The feature is being experimented with under internal names such as Gesture Exchange and Contact Exchange. The current beta reveals only the connective UI — a small but important piece of the user experience. People remember the tiny moments in an interaction (the noise when a file transfers, the shimmer when a photo is sent). Google is clearly polishing that moment first.
Under the hood the code points to NFC as the discovery method. That mirrors how similar proximity features have worked before: NFC often performs a brief handshake and then offloads the heavy data transfer to Bluetooth or Wi‑Fi. Whether Android will rely on NFC alone or use it just to kick off a richer transport is still unknown.
The practical problems Google has to solve
There are a few mundane-but-real challenges here. Unlike iPhones, Android handsets place their NFC coils in different spots: near the camera bump on some models, midway up the back on others. That inconsistency makes the simple act of "touching the phones" less straightforward — expect some users to do the awkward search-for-the-sweet-spot shuffle unless Google adds alignment helpers (haptics, on-screen guidance, or a generous detection area).
Pixel owners might get a smoother experience at first. Recent Pixel models tend to keep their NFC antennas in similar locations, and that could make Pixel-to-Pixel exchanges feel nearly as seamless as Apple's setup.
Why this matters
Contact sharing still can be clumsy: QR codes, fumbling through messages, reading out digits. A tap-to-share workflow that actually works would be a small convenience with big social payoff — quick exchanges at meetups, conferences, or bars where you just want to trade details and move on.
There are also privacy and enterprise questions to resolve. The UI will need to show clear consent prompts and let users choose what card to share (personal vs work email, phone only, etc.), and IT admins will want controls for managed devices. Google has a tendency to iterate in the services layer — shipping through Google Play Services means the experience can reach many phones without waiting for a full OS update, which is what makes this kind of experiment attractive to the company.
Google has been testing other platform-level tweaks in Play Services and system apps recently; this animation is another example of the company iterating on surface polish while the underlying plumbing is finalized (see its work on floating controls for Search Live) See Google testing floating controls and a stop-listening toggle for Search Live.
The move also fits a broader pattern of Google expanding features across its services rather than only in core Android releases — a strategy visible in projects like Gemini for Maps and other AI-led additions to Google products Google Maps gets Gemini conversational copilot.
Where things go from here
Right now the animation is a tease: it confirms development, gives a hint of the user flow, and shows Google paying attention to the small UX details. A full release still needs the actual contact card UI, a permission/consent sheet, and the background transport for data. Expect further teardowns and betas over the coming months; until then this remains a promising preview rather than a finished feature.
If Google gets the engineering and UX right, the tap-to-share moment could become one of those tiny interactions people come to regard as "magic." But the devil is in the details — antenna placement, handoff reliability, privacy controls — and those are exactly the parts Google still appears to be working through.