Action Sheet

An action sheet is the menu that slides up from the bottom of the screen listing the things you can do to whatever you just tapped: Share, Duplicate, Delete. The screen behind it dims and waits while you decide.

You've opened a thousand of these. Long-press a photo, tap the three dots on a message, hit share on almost anything. The layout follows a quiet grammar. The options stack full width so a thumb can't miss them, and the destructive one sits last, so nobody hits Delete while reaching for Share. Cancel gets its own button, set apart below the stack, because the escape hatch should never require reading. Tapping the dimmed area backs out too, which most people discover by accident and then rely on forever.

It looks like a half sheet, and the two get confused constantly. A half sheet is a borrowed panel that can hold anything: a map, a form, a list of ride options. An action sheet holds exactly one thing, a vertical menu of actions. If it slides up from the bottom and every row in it is a verb, it's an action sheet.

You'll also hear action menu or bottom menu, and people call the whole family "the share sheet" after its most famous member, the one full of app icons that appears when you hit share.

When you want "tap the thing, then choose what happens to it," ask for an action sheet. And keep Delete at the bottom, where it can't ambush anyone.