Everyone uses Internet. Some use it to gain knowledge from Wikipedia, some use it to stream videos on YouTube, some use it to stream audio on SoundCloud and well, some use it to connect with people on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, etc. Sometimes, while browsing through your News Feed from you Android, you might have come across several stuff that you wanted to share with others outside of that particular social media app. How would you do that? Well, that’s simple. Copy the link and paste it where you want to share.
This is good as far as you are not sharing that link on Twitter. We are saying this because you must be aware that Twitter has a limit of 140 characters. You simply cannot share lengthy links on Twitter without letting go of something you might want to add with while sharing any link. Well, that’s why URL (Uniform Resource Locator) shorteners were invented. URL shortener, as the name suggests, shortens the URL (or links as many would call it). So, how to shorten URL on Android, you ask. We show you how to shorten URL on Android with the help of this tutorial.
How to shorten URL on Android
Step 1: First of all, download the ‘URL Shortener‘ app from Google Play Store. Open it and ‘enter/type the URL‘ (web link) you want to shorten in the provided text box.
Step 2: After you have entered the URL you want to shorten, select the type of ‘Short URL structure‘ you want the URL to shorten into. We wanted to create a custom short URL so we selected the ‘Custom‘ URL structure. After that, type in the custom URL you prefer. If that URL is not available, any other random URL will be generated.
If you don’t want a custom URL and just want to shorten it, you can select the Standard short URL structure.
Step 3: Select the ‘provider‘. There are total 6 url shortening service provides that you can choose from. We chose ‘is.gd‘ as it provides custom URL structure as well statistics for the shortened URL. If you want to log the statistics for the URL you want to shorten, simply tick the check box provided above the ‘Shorten’ button.
Step 4: After performing all the steps mentioned above, tap on the ‘Shorten‘ button to shorten the URL. A QR Code will also be generated along with the shortened URL. You can tap on the ‘+‘ button located on the right side of the QR code if you want to copy the shortened URL, share the shortened URL or, share the QR code.
Step 5: You can change the default provider, short URL length, QR code size as well its color from the Settings menu. Tap on the ‘three-dots‘ located at the top-right of the app screen and then tap on ‘Settings‘ to access the Settings menu.
Now that you know how to shorten URL on Android, you can get some extra characters to type when you share a URL on Twitter. Also, when you are sharing long URLs it makes sense to shorten the URL and then share it others. It looks good.
If you liked this tutorial make sure you take a look at our How-To Guides section. You can also use the Custom URL is.gd/MobiGuides of our How-To Guides section if you can’t remember the long URL. You can also scan the QR code in the image above to visit our How-To Guides section.
