The Cluttered Sharing Interface
When you right-click a file in Windows 11 and select the “Share” icon, the operating system opens a modern sharing dialogue box. The top row of this box is populated by a list of suggested contacts, while the second row is filled with suggested applications. Windows uses a background algorithm to monitor your activity and automatically suggests apps like Mail, Teams, or Xbox based on what it thinks you use most frequently. For many users, this predictive behaviour is unhelpful, resulting in a cluttered menu filled with applications they never actually intend to use for file sharing.
Removing the Application Suggestions
To clean up the Share menu and stop Windows 11 from constantly reorganizing the application list based on its flawed usage algorithms, you can completely disable the app suggestion feature within the Personalisation settings.
Press the Windows Key and click the gear icon to launch the Settings app. In the left-hand navigation pane, click on Personalisation. In the main window, scroll down and click on Start. You are looking for a specific toggle switch that controls how Windows surfaces recent activity. Locate the toggle labelled Show recently opened items in Start, Jump Lists, and File Explorer. Click this toggle to turn it Off. While this setting seems focused on the Start menu, it is actually the master switch for the algorithmic tracking that powers the Share menu suggestions. Once disabled, the Share menu will stop predicting apps and will only display the static, default list of sharing targets, resulting in a much cleaner and predictable interface.