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One of the most powerful buttons on your phone is also one of the easiest to ignore. Im referring to the humble “Share” button, a mainstay of both iOS and Android that unlocks all kinds of useful features. Beyond just sharing links and photos with other people, the Share button serves as a hub for all kinds of helpful shortcuts. Even so, the Share button often feels undervalued, with some apps even hiding it out of sight. I know this because when I first wrote this column for my Advisorator newsletter subscribers, I got a bunch of emails from folks who never realized how useful the Share button can be. Lets take a few minutes, then, to appreciate everything it can do and optimize it for maximum efficiency. Share button basics Spot the Share buttons in Plexamp, Ivory, and Amazon [Screenshot: Jared Newman] No matter which app youre using, think of the Share button as a way to send data elsewhere. Just tap the button, and youll get a menu of other apps (or even people) to share with. Finding the Share button isnt always so simple, though. In some apps, the button appears as a box with an arrow pointing outwards, while in others it may resemble a set of dots with interconnected lines. You might also just see the word Share instead. Certain apps even hide the full Share menu out of sight. In Instagram, for instance, you must hit the paper airplane icon at the bottom of a post, then hit the “Share via” button. Bluesky does something similar, making you hit a secondary “Share via” button after tapping the Share icon in a post. Just know that if an app has shareable infowhether its a link, a photo, or a filetheres likely a Share button hiding somewhere. Know what to share Share menus on Android (left) and iPhone (right) [Screenshot: Jared Newman] The Share buttons most basic use is sending photos or links to friends. From your photo gallery, for instance, hitting the Share button underneath an image lets you share it through other apps such as Messages or Facebook. But beyond that, the Share button serves as a hub for all kinds of time-saving shortcuts. Some of my favorite examples: Saving links from a web browser to a bookmarking app such as Raindrop, or to a read-it-later app such as Instapaper Using the Contacts app on iOS or Android to pass along someones contact info in a text message Sending an emailed PDF file to Notability for annotation Copying shareable playlist links from music apps such as Spotify Sending a file directly from email to a cloud storage service such as Dropbox or OneDrive Using the iOS Files app or Googles Android Files app to send multiple files as email attachments The possibilities are only limited by the apps youve installed on your phone, so try experimenting with the Share button in different apps to see what you can do. Android users: Note that the full list of options may not appear when you first hit the Share button. Depending on your device, you may have to scroll through the list and hit More to see all of your apps. Pin your favorites Pinning favorite apps on Samsung, Google Pixel, and iPhone [Screenshot: Jared Newman] Once youve found some favorite apps to use with the Share menu, you can pin them to the beginning of the menu for faster access. On iOS: Scroll to the end of the horizontal icon list, hit the More button, then hit Edit. Hit the + button next to any app to add it to your favorites, then use the button to reorder them. On Android: If necessary, hit the More button until you see a full list of icons. Depending on the phone, you can either long-press an icon to pin it, or (on Samsung phones, for instance) hit the pencil icon and drag your favorites to the top. Hide suggested contacts (iPhone only) By default, the iOS share sheet includes a row of people to share with at the very top. If youre bothered by these suggestionsas I amyou can hide specific contacts or remove this section altogether. Hide a contact: Long-press their pofile picture, then hit Suggest Less. Hide all contacts: Head to Settings > Siri & Search (or Apple Intelligence & Siri), then look under Suggestions from Apple, and disable Show when Sharing. Discover extra actions Extra actions in the Share menuincluding a print function. [Screenshot: Jared Newman] The Share menu isnt just a way to send data to other apps. It can also provide useful actions within the app youre already using. For example: In Safari for iOS, the Share button is where youll find important browser features such as Find in Page and Add Bookmark. Both iOS and Android let you print documents from the Share menu. Just look for the Print button when sharing from your web browser or apps like Google Docs. Hitting Share in Chrome for Android lets you take a full-page screenshot. Hitting Share in iOS Photos brings up options to turn an image into a wallpaper or Apple Watch face, or assign it to a contact. On iOS, you can expand the Share menu even further with Shortcuts. For instance, installing CmlCmlCml adds an option to the Share menu on Amazons app to check an items price history, while this Shortcut takes the current web page and reads it aloud. Explore the Gallery section of the Shortcuts app for more ideas. Note that on iOS, these additional actions can be reordered as well. Just scroll to the bottom of the list and hit Edit Actions, and you can pin your favorites to the top. Faced with so many options, its tempting to just tune out the Share button entirely. But if you take some time to explore its intricacies, you might wonder how you ever got by without it. This story first appeared in Jared’s Advisorator newsletter. Sign up to get more advice every Tuesday.
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This fantasy football season, Aaron VanSledright is letting his bot call the shots. Ahead of the NFL season, the Chicago-based cloud engineer built a custom AI draft agent that pulls real-time data from ESPN and FantasyPros, factoring in last-minute intel like injuries and roster cuts. Using his background in coding and cloud computing, VanSledright spun up the agent in just a week with Anthropics Claude large language models. He also tapped Amazon Web Services tools, including the new Strands SDK, which helps developers launch agents with just a few lines of code. “Let’s see how well the AI performs against other humans, because nobody else in my league is doing this,” he tells Fast Company. In this Premium story, subscribers will learn: How players are using AI to improve player selection and create balanced rosters The off-the-shelf AI products that anyone can play with Why even early adopters are leaving room for human decisions VanSledright customized the bot for the quirks of his two-quarterback league (where each team must start two QBs) by designing a weighting system that values positions differently depending on how the draft unfolds: Stockpile skill players first, grab quarterbacks next, and then fill out the rest. The bot will stay active all season, offering weekly lineup projections. He hopes it will ease the pressureand the visceral angstof making his own picks. Admittedly terrible at fantasy football, VanSledright wanted to see what would happen if he stripped the human emotion out of this season. Could AI outperform his own mind, gut, and memory? “[League-mates] are going to show up with their emotion-based picks, maybe some facts based on projections and everything,” VanSledright says. “But it’s kind of all who you feel week to week.” Hes not alone. As generative AI becomes more accessible, fantasy players are experimenting with DIY tools to optimize their teamsfrom chatbots that suggest sleepers to scouts that analyze rivals drafting habits. Whether these experiments produce game-winning Hail Marys or just new scapegoats when the season goes south, one thing is clear: Fantasy football players are increasingly willing to let machines take on decisions long dominated by human bias. “Like a scout sitting next to you” Chatter about AI in fantasy football is picking up. Mentions of the topic across X, Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, and Reddit jumped 728% year over year, according to the software firm Sprinklr. (Still, with only 14,000 posts in 2025, the conversation remains relatively niche.) Ryan Laughlin, a longtime fantasy football fan, is taking a different approach: using AI to track and predict his competition. Combining his own machine learning model with historical data from Yahoos API and OpenAIs LLMs, Laughlinwho works in commerce payments at JPMorgan Chase while pursuing a computer science masters degree part-timeset out to analyze how his league-mates have drafted in past seasons. The result is a draft scout that generates AI summaries of league players tendencies, showing who delays drafting quarterbacks and who prioritizes running backs. As Laughlin explains it: People often forget each managers style year to year. His tool is designed to feel like a scout sitting next to you, trying to help you win your fantasy week. To test the concept, Laughlin spent a few hundred dollars on Reddit ads targeting fantasy football subreddits, inviting others to try it and share feedback. “I’ve gotten actually pretty strong feedback from people who say it resonates with them,” Laughlin says. “Like they read their own profile and say it’s actually kind of true and kind of weirdly accurate. They don’t have objections to it, but people aren’t incentivized to share it because if you share with your league, you’re giving away the competitive advantage.” AI in fantasy football isnt entirely new. Back in 2015, IBM Watson rolled out tools that crunched data from Twitter activity, coaching stats, football articles, and more. Today, IBM is in its ninth year of a partnership with ESPN. Its Watsonx platform now powers features like an “AI Weekly Preview” and data-driven categories suggesting which players to add, drop, or trade. But now those tools are reaching scale. Roughly 13 million fantasy players use IBM features (up from 12 million last year), according to Kameryn Stanhouse, IBMs vice president of sports and entertainment partnerships. Behind the recommendations: 36 billion data points, from player stats and team performance to news coverage, media sentiment, and injury reports. There are the typical stats that you’re getting that everyone has access to, Stanhouse says. But also the ability to use that unstructured data and be able to scan the web and understand what reporters are saying. If players are getting a lot of positive media sentiment there, we’re attributing value to those as opposed to others.” “People treat AI as an Oracle” Startups are also pushing into fantasy sports from other industries. Sourcetable, originally built for stock traders and hedge funds, now offers its AI-driven spreadsheet platform with features tailored to fantasy football. By pulling data from ESPN, Sleeper, and Yahoo, the tool enables deeper modeling and real-time insights. Founder and CEO Eoin McMillan sees potential to expand into other sports, though he acknowledges some trade-offs. Maybe Im just nostalgic, but I do think we lose some excitement from the game as we move increasingly toward stats management, McMillan says. On the other hand, Brady and Belichick were clearly early at being disciplined on this game-manager-mode trend, and the results showed. Others are building tools to rethink how lineups come together in real time. Phoenix-based data scientist Ben Jensen, for example, created a draft optimizer to help assemble a balanced roster during live draftssomething traditional player projections rarely address. His tool accounts for roster constraints, models hypothetical picks from rival managers, and reflects his personal preferences with tags ranging from strongly like to strongly dislike. It also simulates whether to take or wait on certain players. Jensen notes that he used AI mainly for coding, not for decision-makin. That distinction, he says, prevents blind trust in a system with its own risks. Too often people treat AI as an oracle instead, and then get frustrated when it isnt a magic bullet, he says. To whatever extent I inform my strategies with AI, I still am accountable for the outcome.
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Theres no other phone Id rather be using right now than Samsungs Galaxy Z Fold7and thats a problem. Ive been a foldable phone appreciator for a while now, and a couple of years ago, I caved and bought a Galaxy Z Fold5 for my own personal use. The phone was far from perfect, but I loved being able to conjure a small tablet from my pocket to watch videos, read e-books, and multitask. Two years later, it is really hard going back to that phoneor to any non-foldable phone, for that matter. Using the Fold7 on loan from Samsung has emphasized just how compromised those earlier efforts were, and it makes those prior shortcomings a lot harder to overlook. Its a normal-size phone now Unlike a lot of other reviewers, I never hated the narrow outer screen on Samsungs previous foldables. Compared with other large smartphones, that screen was easier to use one-handed, and I grew accustomed to only using it on the go. [Photo: Jared Newman] But yes, it is nicer having a foldable phone whose outer screen works in any scenario. The Fold7s 6.5-inch outer screen is about 8 millimeters narrower across than an iPhone 16 Pro Max, so the ease of using it one-handed isnt entirely gone. But unfolding it when Im on the couch or at the kitchen counter doesnt feel as much like a necessity. The bigger deal, though, is the extent to which the Fold7 feels like a regular phone now. When folded shut, its 3.2 millimeters thinner than last years Fold6, and only about 0.7 millimeters thicker than an iPhone 16 Pro Max. Its also 12 grams lighter than Apples largest phone, and they just dont feel all that different anymore. You could even put a case on the Fold7 without adding insufferable levels of bulk. The only other foldable phones that have reached this territory are ones you cant buy in the United States, like Honors Magic V5 and Oppos Find N5. The inner screen isnt as weird Samsung isnt making a big deal about crease improvements in the Galaxy Z Foldmaybe because it doesnt want to draw attention to the crease to begin withbut its far less pronounced now. Youll still see it and feel it under your fingers, but the indent is gentler and blends in better when the screen is on. [Photo: Jared Newman] Theres also one other major improvement that wont show up on a spec sheet: Compared with my Fold5, the inner screen of the Fold7 has less of a gap between the built-in screen protector and the bezels around the display. That gap is a dust magnet on the older phone, and it can quickly get kind of gross in there. That hasnt been a problem with the Fold7. Multitasking is better Like earlier versions, the Fold7 can run two apps side by side or in floating windows. This is especially handy for watching live TV while doing other things, like dealing with emails or browsing the web. [Photo: Jared Newman] But on the Fold7, Samsung added a new mode thats more about quickly switching between a pair of full-size apps. If you open the apps in split screen, then drag the divider almost to the edge of the screen, youll see a narrow glimpse of the other app, and you can tap on it to switch over. Its a lot easier than using clunky swipe gestures, and it feels sort of like having two apps open, side by side, on a much larger screen. Its still a compromise None of these improvements means that the Galaxy Z Fold7 is just as good as a regular phone in every way. Foldable phones have inherent size and cost constraints that continue to require compromise. The main one, still, is camera quality. Yes, Samsung improved the Fold7s rear camera with a 200-megapixel wide-angle lens and larger image sensor, matching the S25 Ultra, but the ultrawide and telephoto lenses lack the same parity. (Limited optical zoom is the thing I miss most compared with other flagships.) Even with the main lens, the Fold7 struggles with motion in low lightI got a bunch of bad photos last weekend at an escape room with my familythough this may be more of a Samsung problem than a foldable one. The Fold7s fingerprint reader also remains under the power button on the side of the phone. I dont see this as a major downgrade from under-display fingerprint readers, but it does take some getting used to. (Like other Samsung phones, the Fold7 offers face recognition as an unlock option, but its less secure than the iPhone and Pixel phone versions, with the possibility of being fooled by an image of your face.) Then there are the little missing things, like S Pen support, dust-proofing, and Qi2 magnetic accessories. While Google added the latter two features to its forthcoming Pixel 10 Pro Fold, it made the phone thicker and heavier than last years model to accommodate them. Phone makers will inevitably whittle away at these things. Honors Magic V5, for instance, works with a stylus despite being slightly thinner than the Fld7and its use of silicon carbon batteries shows how device makers could fit more tech in less space. [Photo: Jared Newman] And yes, the Fold7 costs $2,000, which is $100 more than last years Fold6. Subsidies from the major U.S. carriers can knock that price in half, but thats still asking a lot when theyre offering subsidized iPhone 16s and Galaxy S25s at no cost. What Samsung wont tell you, though, is that the value of these phones drops like rocks on the secondhand market. The Fold7 only launched a month ago, yet its already selling for more than $600 under the list price in mint condition on sites like Swappa. Thats probably the road Ill end up traveling when I send the Fold7 back to Samsung and find my two-year-old Fold5 unbearable by comparison.
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