Sharing .flo files

[Tony G]

I'm trying to make it easy to deliver flows to my friends without asking them to go to the Community pages. The Community pages are for public flows and for now I want to keep this within a small circle of users.

 

If I put my .flo files in DropBox, I can a link via SMS, but the browser opens to DropBox.com, and when clicked the link doesn't offer Automate as an option for opening.

 

If I put the flows into a folder and send the DropBox link to that folder, one of the flows is consistently offered as a text or HTML file. No clue why.

 

If I save a group of flows in a zip and put that in Downloads, the Import function doesn't offer an option to Import from Zip - the .zip file is disabled when viewing Downloads files for Import.

 

Automate doesn't offer SMS as a Share option.

 

For other options that are offered for Share, I can't guarantee that each friend has access to the same apps - and not everyone checks their email by phone.

 

I could write a flow to FTP upload files to my website and return a link into the clipboard which is then sent via SMS to a chosen contact. The problem there is that the .flo extension isn't recognized by any applicationso there's no guarantee someone will be able to download a .flo file from a website and launch Automate without having to put it in Downloads first and then doing a manual import.

 

As you see, I'm looking for a simple mechanism, consistent across all phones regardless of their installed apps (other than Automate itself) to tell people "do this to get the file".

 

The users I'm talking about are not technically inclined. They're "average users". I can't ask them to do a lot of manual operations, fiddle with the file system, rename files, or do anything other than click things that are already on their phones.

 

Thanks!

[Henrik Lindqvist]

The problem is that neither DropBox nor a an FTP server store the mime/file type, so Android can route the file to Automate.
Google Drive do store the mime type, but it sometimes gets lost if the flow isn't directly exported from Automate.
There's no solution for this, not more that i already do, registering for the flow custom type, the generic binary type and the .flo file extension.

Flows should always be importable from within Automate using the import menu.

Use the Content receive block to create your own "share" target.