Sharing image and text to Facebook Messenger with UIActivityViewController failing

Question

What changes to the code below must be made to ensure Messenger plays nicely with UIActivityViewController and shares both the image and text, or at the very least, the image?

Background

I am using UIActivityViewController to share text and images from my app and send them to email, messages and other sharing apps. UIActivityViewController is great and works in a simple and standard way with most apps… but, I’m having issues with Messenger (Facebook Messenger) which doesn’t want to cooperate.

In the below code, I tap a UIButton which takes a snapshot image of the screen, turns it into a .png, and then sends the prepared image (imageShare) along with my prepared text (textShare) to the UIActivityViewController. This simple method allows my app to successfully share to email, messages and many other sharing apps except Messenger.

(Side note, Facebook is only able to share the prepared image (imageShare) but not the text.)

Issues

These are the problems when trying to share with UIActivityViewController to Messenger :

• When sharing activityItems: [textShare, imageShare]

  • Messenger only sends the shared text.

• When sharing activityItems: [textShare]

  • The option to share to Messenger is not even available in UIActivityViewController.

• When sharing activityItems: [imageShare]

  • An error is displayed: “Couldn't Load Content. There was a problem while loading your content. Please try again.”

Code

@IBAction func myButton(sender: UIButton) {

    // Take snapshot of screen
    let imageSnapshot: UIImage!
    UIGraphicsBeginImageContextWithOptions(self.view.frame.size, false, 0)
    self.view.drawViewHierarchyInRect(CGRect(x: 0, y: 0, width: self.view.bounds.width, height: self.view.bounds.height), afterScreenUpdates: false)
    imageSnapshot = UIGraphicsGetImageFromCurrentImageContext()
    UIGraphicsEndImageContext()

    // Prepare text to share
    let textShare: String!
    textShare = "This is my original text."

    // Prepare image to share
    let imageShare: NSData
    imageShare = UIImagePNGRepresentation(imageSnapshot)!

    // Share text and image
    let activity = UIActivityViewController(activityItems: [textShare, imageShare], applicationActivities: nil)
    if UIDevice.currentDevice().userInterfaceIdiom == .Phone {
        self.presentViewController(activity, animated: true, completion: nil)
    }

}

Image

iOS presenting the UIActivityViewController with available applications.