After a short hiatus yesterday, it looks like Nearby Share has returned for many again, and it seems like it's rolled out much more widely this time around. The Apple AirDrop competitor, currently still under development and not 100% officially announced, started surfacing about a month ago in beta, and began hitting stable users around a week later, but the feature disappeared for many yesterday, July 29.

Many tipsters have reached out to us to tell us that Nearby Share is now back for them. Some AP team members also report getting access to Nearby Share for the first time today, along with many more reports around the web, with people saying it's surfacing on Android versions as old as Android 8 Oreo. Some are also running stable Play Services (specifically 20.26.14 (120400-320008519)), so Nearby Share is not necessarily limited to beta users anymore.

Nearby Share is back in action for our tipsters.

Originally, we got tips from a few readers stating that Nearby Share had disappeared from their devices after updating to the latest version of Play Services (20.30.15). The Quick Settings tile remains, but it's grayed out and unusable. We additionally found a reddit thread full of people whose Nearby Share had also gone missing. We'd share some screenshots, but they wouldn't be very helpful since they'd just show nothing is there.

We initially feared that the feature would only come back when Android 11 is fully released, but it looks like the disappearance was only due to something like a short hiccup, error, or deliberate pause on Google's end.

UPDATE: 2020/07/30 6:55am PDT BY MANUEL VONAU

Updated to reflect that Nearby Share is rolling out widely now.

Thanks: Gionata, Eduardo, Armando, Tambe, Moshe, Nick