Open Radar

 
Summary: When sharing images, the user has the option to choose from all kinds of services. Twitter, Facebook, emailing are all supported, and yet one of the most common forms of communication, texting, is unsupported. This is especially strange given Apple's push for iMessaging. Why should a user be able to send only text through 3rd party apps? They expect to be able to share images just like the built-in apps, and us developers have to jump through hoops to allow them to do this. The only solutions are either a) uploading to a database, which means if the receiver doesn't have a web-connected phone they can't receive it, or b) abusing UIPasteboard. With the UIActivityViewController making it so easy to share objects, why can't we share images via the UIActivityTypeMessage?

Steps to Reproduce: Pass a UIImage or NSData containing image data to an UIActivityViewController.

Expected Results: There is an option to share the image using the UIActivityTypeMessage

Actual Results: UIActivityTypeMessage doesn't appear as an option.

Regression: There's also no way to add an image to MFMessageComposeViewController, which has been the case for the past two years.

Notes: If there is a reason for why developers haven't been able to do this, I would love to know. However, since iOS 6 uses the UIActivityViewController to share photos from the Photos.app, you now CANNOT message photos anymore due to UIActivityTypeMessage not supporting UIImage/NSData. So since this seems to be an oversight, when you fix it can you make it so us developers can use it too? Pretty please?