Side note- The Screenshot culture itself needs to die, sorry. Many a time, a share button simply works. I don’t know why people would share a screenshot or a map instead of pin and share their location. Yes there are cases where a screenshot helps but majority cases simply is “come to this place” a which turns out to make more difficult because people apparently don’t know how to share locations with pin and share!

> Many a time, a share button simply works

It works! Unless:

- the person you’re linking it to doesn’t have an account on that platform

- you’re posting it in a chat, and the site doesn’t implement unfurls correctly

- the site shows a thumbnail on the link, but clicking on it gets hijacked by the “mAkE an aCcOuNt/ login here” shenanigans.

- you’re trying to link to something in context and the sites linking doesn’t support it

- the site is riddled with ads.

- the site is slow to load.

- you’re trying to save something and don’t want to have to load the site every single time in order to refer to it.

- any combination of the above.

Screenshots are much better for archival. So many times you go back to a url/link you shared, and poof it's gone or the content has changed from when you sent it.

Screenshots allows you to get a point in time reference to what you are sharing.

The ideal "World Wide Web" envisioned by it's original design, was that a URI was a durable pointer to an immutable piece of information.

In 2026, we now know that the information can be edited, or completely removed for many reasons, some legitimate, and some nefarious.

Taking a screenshot is the easiest way to ensure the original is kept for folks to see. Frankly, it'd be even better if (a) the app can signal to the OS information about the url to the page for the screenshot, (b) timestamps were captured in the image and not cropped, and (c) the OS can authenticate the screen shot and digitally sign that it came from an unaltered device.

In the case of sharing a link I have to remember/find where it is in each app, likely scroll through a long list of messaging (and for some reason non-messaging apps) to find the correct app, select the contact, and then pray that the link sent actually works for them and contains the correct information I'm seeing (very often the link will actually direct them to a web version of the app I'm using, then put a modal popup in front of the information asking them to use the app, then either send them to the app store, or send them to the app but strip out the actual information I linked and send them to a blank map).

Screenshots are clunky and unideal, but at least they're fast and I know that they don't fail or break or send the wrong info to my contact.

If it were a one off message, this wouldn't be an issue, but if you zoom out on the issue and see you're sending up to a hundred messages a day, points of failure become major life frictions and you're trained out of using things like links in messaging apps.