To add insult to injury, sometimes the share sheet is really, really slow! Like several seconds with no UI feedback to indicate anything is going on! That’s quite frustrating when I want to quickly invoke my password manager or search on page.

I agree, the share sheet is just too confusing. Favorites management, my password manager, air drop, texting, find on page, and the kitchen sink are all in there and are quite undiscoverable if you don’t know to look for them.

To add some confusion on top of that, some features and extensions go in the similarly un-discoverable “aA” button in the URL bar, so it’s not even like everything goes in the share sheet. That button is really tough to remember even exists since it goes away when you scroll.

You don’t have to use Share for Find on Page. Just type in the address bar, then “On this Page” will be the bottom option. Obviously, that doesn’t seem to be sufficiently discoverable as well.

It is a general pattern that the share menu is the collection of everything that didn’t justify its own icon.

I have to close the keyboard or scroll out-of-view for this to be visible. It could have been the second option shown TBH.

Yes, it being at the bottom is certainly annoying.

Wow. TIL. Annoyed I never knew this. Thanks tho.

Agreed.

Photos have an option to mark photos as hidden, so they won't show up in random places.

Its meant to be for more sensitive photos.

If you want to mark a picture as hidden, yep, its under the share icon.

And they used to ridicule Windows for hiding Shut down in the Start menu...

This was thankfully fixed in iOS 16. The “hide” option is now in the triple-dot menu in the top right corner.

The share button also has actions that vary unnecessarily.

For example, in SFSafariViewController there is no “add to home screen” button, but in actual safari there is. Despite them both being web view experiences controlled entirely by Apple.

(And you can’t detect SFSafariViewController vs Safari as a web app, so good luck onboarding users for your PWA.)

You can also just type in the url bar to find on page (also super unintuitive)

Have you looked at Apple’s Shortcuts App that allows some customisation of the share actions? e.g. that is the way to run JavaScript snippets in a web page on Mobile Safari (equivalent to javascript: bookmark urls in desktop browsers). I’ve only tried it on iPad, but I presume it works the same on iPhone (it would be unobvious if it didn’t).

The Shortcuts App is the way to access some deep and very unobvious functionality.

and this keeps changing too!

in Safari, things constantly switch between the Share icon, and the "Aa" menu in the URL bar!