iOS needs to open up API for contextual menus. There's no reason why we must c/p data between apps like little apple monkeys!

Integration of Twitter an Facebook sharing options on a system level is an attempt of making data more portable between apps and services, but only in its most basic form. They are not even the tip of the iceberg of possibilities for improving the workflow of other applications and thus overall usefulness of the entire platform.

The current limitations seem to be of design and political nature, rather than technological. The potential sea of contextual options installed by apps could easily be controlled by the user from global settings menu in a similar fashion as location services.

The problem with opening it up to any application that wants to use the context menus is that the menu would quickly become overrun by items. I have over 120 apps on my iPhone/iPad (Apple says the average is over 100) and even if 10% of them add to the contextual menu, it quickly becomes a mess.

I also have a similar amount of apps, but only a handful that opens PDFs, say. Even if I had many more, that's easy to handle by sorting the latest used ones to the top.