Basic example for sharing text or image with UIActivityViewController in Swift

I started my search by wanting to know how I could share to other apps in iOS. I discovered that two important ways are

• UIActivityViewController
• UIDocumentInteractionController

These and other methods are compared in this SO answer.

Often when I am learning a new concept I like to see a basic example to get me started. Once I get something basic set up I can modify it how I like later.

There are many SO questions related to UIActivityViewController, but I couldn't find any that were just asking for a simple example. Since I just learned how to do this, I will provide my own answer below. Feel free to add a better one (or an Objective-C version).

UIActivityViewController Example Project

Set up your storyboard with two buttons and hook them up to your view controller (see code below).

Add an image to your Assets.xcassets. I called mine "lion".

Code

import UIKit
class ViewController: UIViewController {
    
    // share text
    @IBAction func shareTextButton(_ sender: UIButton) {
        
        // text to share
        let text = "This is some text that I want to share."
        
        // set up activity view controller
        let textToShare = [ text ]
        let activityViewController = UIActivityViewController(activityItems: textToShare, applicationActivities: nil)
        activityViewController.popoverPresentationController?.sourceView = self.view // so that iPads won't crash
        
        // exclude some activity types from the list (optional)
        activityViewController.excludedActivityTypes = [ UIActivity.ActivityType.airDrop, UIActivity.ActivityType.postToFacebook ]
        
        // present the view controller
        self.present(activityViewController, animated: true, completion: nil)
        
    }
    
    // share image
    @IBAction func shareImageButton(_ sender: UIButton) {
        
        // image to share
        let image = UIImage(named: "Image")
        
        // set up activity view controller
        let imageToShare = [ image! ]
        let activityViewController = UIActivityViewController(activityItems: imageToShare, applicationActivities: nil)
        activityViewController.popoverPresentationController?.sourceView = self.view // so that iPads won't crash
        
        // exclude some activity types from the list (optional)
        activityViewController.excludedActivityTypes = [ UIActivity.ActivityType.airDrop, UIActivity.ActivityType.postToFacebook ]
        
        // present the view controller
        self.present(activityViewController, animated: true, completion: nil)
    }
    
}

Result

Clicking "Share some text" gives result on the left and clicking "Share an image" gives the result on the right.

Notes

• I retested this with iOS 11 and Swift 4. I had to run it a couple times in the simulator before it worked because it was timing out. This may be because my computer is slow.
• If you wish to hide some of these choices, you can do that with excludedActivityTypes as shown in the code above.
• Not including the popoverPresentationController?.sourceView line will cause your app to crash when run on an iPad.
• This does not allow you to share text or images to other apps. You probably want UIDocumentInteractionController for that.

See also

• Add sharing to your Swift app via UIActivityViewController

• UIActivity​View​Controller from NSHipster

• UIActivityViewController documentation

• Share extension documentation

• comparison with UIDocumentInteractionController

Share : Text

@IBAction func shareOnlyText(_ sender: UIButton) {
    let text = "This is the text....."
    let textShare = [ text ]
    let activityViewController = UIActivityViewController(activityItems: textShare , applicationActivities: nil)
    activityViewController.popoverPresentationController?.sourceView = self.view 
    self.present(activityViewController, animated: true, completion: nil)
}
}

Share : Image

@IBAction func shareOnlyImage(_ sender: UIButton) {
    let image = UIImage(named: "Product")
    let imageShare = [ image! ]
    let activityViewController = UIActivityViewController(activityItems: imageShare , applicationActivities: nil)
    activityViewController.popoverPresentationController?.sourceView = self.view 
    self.present(activityViewController, animated: true, completion: nil)
 }

Share : Text - Image - URL

   @IBAction func shareAll(_ sender: UIButton) {
    let text = "This is the text...."
    let image = UIImage(named: "Product")
    let myWebsite = NSURL(string:"https://stackoverflow.com/users/4600136/mr-javed-multani?tab=profile")
    let shareAll= [text , image! , myWebsite]
    let activityViewController = UIActivityViewController(activityItems: shareAll, applicationActivities: nil)
    activityViewController.popoverPresentationController?.sourceView = self.view 
    self.present(activityViewController, animated: true, completion: nil)
   }

Just as a note you can also use this for iPads:

activityViewController.popoverPresentationController?.sourceView = sender

So the popover pops from the sender (the button in that case).

I found this to work flawlessly if you want to share whole screen.

@IBAction func shareButton(_ sender: Any) {
    
    let bounds = UIScreen.main.bounds
    UIGraphicsBeginImageContextWithOptions(bounds.size, true, 0.0)
    self.view.drawHierarchy(in: bounds, afterScreenUpdates: false)
    let img = UIGraphicsGetImageFromCurrentImageContext()
    UIGraphicsEndImageContext()
    let activityViewController = UIActivityViewController(activityItems: [img!], applicationActivities: nil)
    activityViewController.popoverPresentationController?.sourceView = self.view
    self.present(activityViewController, animated: true, completion: nil)
}

I've used the implementation above and just now I came to know that it doesn't work on iPad running iOS 13. I had to add these lines before present() call in order to make it work

//avoiding to crash on iPad
if let popoverController = activityViewController.popoverPresentationController {
     popoverController.sourceRect = CGRect(x: UIScreen.main.bounds.width / 2, y: UIScreen.main.bounds.height / 2, width: 0, height: 0)
     popoverController.sourceView = self.view
     popoverController.permittedArrowDirections = UIPopoverArrowDirection(rawValue: 0)
}

That's how it works for me

func shareData(_ dataToShare: [Any]){
        
        let activityViewController = UIActivityViewController(activityItems: dataToShare, applicationActivities: nil)
        
        //exclude some activity types from the list (optional)
        //activityViewController.excludedActivityTypes = [
            //UIActivity.ActivityType.postToFacebook
        //]
        
        //avoiding to crash on iPad
        if let popoverController = activityViewController.popoverPresentationController {
            popoverController.sourceRect = CGRect(x: UIScreen.main.bounds.width / 2, y: UIScreen.main.bounds.height / 2, width: 0, height: 0)
            popoverController.sourceView = self.view
            popoverController.permittedArrowDirections = UIPopoverArrowDirection(rawValue: 0)
        }
        
        self.present(activityViewController, animated: true, completion: nil)
    }

You may use the following functions which I wrote in one of my helper class in a project.

just call

showShareActivity(msg:"message", image: nil, url: nil, sourceRect: nil) 

and it will work for both iPhone and iPad. If you pass any view's CGRect value by sourceRect it will also shows a little arrow in iPad.

func topViewController()-> UIViewController{
    var topViewController:UIViewController = UIApplication.shared.keyWindow!.rootViewController!
    
    while ((topViewController.presentedViewController) != nil) {
        topViewController = topViewController.presentedViewController!;
    }
    
    return topViewController
}

func showShareActivity(msg:String?, image:UIImage?, url:String?, sourceRect:CGRect?){
    var objectsToShare = [AnyObject]()
    
    if let url = url {
        objectsToShare = [url as AnyObject]
    }
    
    if let image = image {
        objectsToShare = [image as AnyObject]
    }
    
    if let msg = msg {
        objectsToShare = [msg as AnyObject]
    }
    
    let activityVC = UIActivityViewController(activityItems: objectsToShare, applicationActivities: nil)
    activityVC.modalPresentationStyle = .popover
    activityVC.popoverPresentationController?.sourceView = topViewController().view
    if let sourceRect = sourceRect {
        activityVC.popoverPresentationController?.sourceRect = sourceRect
    }
    
    topViewController().present(activityVC, animated: true, completion: nil)
}