We’ve updated the Pushbullet Android app for Andoid M, adding support for runtime permissions, Direct Share, and more. Grab the update from the Play Store now!

Probably the most important new feature of Android 6.0 is runtime permissions. Instead of having to approve every single permission an app wants before being able to install it (or update), you can now approve permissions as an app needs them. This is a massive improvement for both users and developers so we’ve added first-class support for runtime permissions to our Android app.

Now, Pushbullet only asks for the permissions it needs when you enable features like our SMS sync or Notification Mirroring. Don’t want SMS sync enabled? No problem at all. You can be confident that we can’t read your text messages without your permission. We think this is exactly how it should work.

Pushbullet may ask for up to 4 permission groups: SMS, Contacts, Phone, and Storage. We work the permissions requests into our setup process and feel this results in a more transparent app.

Even though runtime permissions are awesome, they’re not the only new thing in this update. We’ve also made pushing simpler with M’s new Direct Share feature.

Pushing is now faster than ever with Direct Share.

Direct Share enables apps to suggest add Share options to the Android Share menu. This is incredibly cool for Pushbullet, and here’s why:

We can now add your most recent devices right to the Android Share menu, making pushing to another device even faster. Since pushing between devices is often a primary use of Pushbullet, this is a huge improvement. We know you’ll love it when you try it. It makes pushing feel even more like magic.

In future updates we’ll be making the options we add even smarter bytaking into account how frequently a device is pushed to from specific devices. We’ll also make sure to work in other frequent sharing targets for those that push to friends more often than devices.

This is awesome! What else is in the update?

We spent a lot of time on this update, working to make sure everything worked great not just on Marshmallow, but on every version of Android we support. This means a bunch of bugs got squished and we improved the app’s performance everywhere we could. SMS sync will be faster, everything will use less battery, and we even shrunk the app’s size by 25%. Not bad at all right?

I also put special effort into attempting to fix the mysterious Marshmallow MMS issue that Pushbullet seems to be causing for some. If you’ve been affected, please let me know if this update has helped or not by the Send feedback option in the app.

We’re really excited to have our Android app optimized for Android 6.0. We hope you’re excited about the new features too. Now lets hope we all get our Marshmallow updates fast!

Let us know you think in the comments and if you have ideas for how we can make Pushbullet on Marshmallow even better, tell us that too!

PS: Check out the Pushbullet subreddit to join with other Pushbullet fans to discuss feature requests with us, see cool uses for Pushbullet, and help track down bugs.