My problem is that all these alternatives require the devices to be on the same local network.
One beauty of Airdrop is that it creates and handles that local network automatically under the hood (as far as I understand). So you could be out on a hike with friends and Airdrop something.
The workaround I've found after switching to an Android device has been to teather my connection to my friend's device, which ends up creating a LAN that Localsend can work through, but this is not as nice an experience.
The protocol Apple uses under the hood is AWDL (Apple Wireless Direct Link), which is a proprietary peer-to-peer layer that runs alongside your existing WiFi connection without dropping it. It uses a time-sliced channel-hopping mechanism so the radio can serve both infrastructure WiFi and the direct peer link simultaneously.
That's the part that's hard to replicate. LocalSend and most alternatives need an existing shared network because they're just TCP/IP, they have no way to negotiate a direct radio link without OS-level support. Even Android's QuickShare, which does peer-to-peer via WiFi Direct, drops your existing WiFi connection on older devices because the radio can only be associated with one BSS at a time.
The EU interoperability mandate lxgr mentions would theoretically require Apple to expose this, but AWDL interop would mean licensing or reverse-engineering some fairly deep radio scheduling logic, so I'd expect compliance via a different (probably slower) path.
>It uses a time-sliced channel-hopping mechanism so the radio can serve both infrastructure WiFi and the direct peer link simultaneously.
This seems like such a basic solution that I'm surprised that it isn't required by any of the mainstream standards before WiFi Aware. I wonder if this was some sort of a patent issue or similar.
It is entirely possible to inject (unrelated) wifi frames while being associated to a BSS without violating the existing 802.11 standards. That’s why Apple is able to implement AWDL on standard compliant wifi hardware.
However the path towards this type of interoperability would likely go through additional standardization via IEEE 802.11* and the Wi-Fi alliance. At which point Apple will need to implement and support the new standards. There is no need to reverse engineer AWDL to meet the new European interoperability requirements.
What is needed is for wifi chipset OEMs to implement such standardization.
Something pretty routine of them.
It can be expected that Apple will also maintain the proprietary AWDL in order to support their legacy devices.
> which is a proprietary peer-to-peer layer that runs alongside your existing WiFi connection without dropping it. It uses a time-sliced channel-hopping mechanism so the radio can serve both infrastructure WiFi and the direct peer link simultaneously.
Maybe a network nerd can chime in - is this implementation so difficult that it's unrealistic we'll see an OSS version?
I think the thing that makes an OSS implementation more difficult than iOS/macOS is the friction involved.
Say you've got an android phone, windows PC, and a linux box, and you want to be able to quickly drop files from each one. unless we get some kind of cooperation across all three platforms at the OS level, you'd at minimum need to install some kind of client into each system - when the nicest feature of airdrop is that it's baked into all of Apple's OSs, in my opinion. even if it worked exactly the same way, but had to be installed, I think it would see less use - and there's no real way for a single OSS project to do that across multiple OS platforms, to my knowledge
AWDL is such an amazing technology, it's understandable that Apple wants to keep it only for their devices as it gives them a noticeable advantage for quick stuff sharing.
This is misinformation, including most of the comments here, the majority of phones from 2014 support Wi-Fi Direct, and simultaneous group and station mode (2 BSS, yes even different channels). Even most Wi-Fi chips generally not just smartphones for a very long time. They stay connected to your home network.
When Quickshare drops your Wi-Fi connection, its not Direct anymore, that's just soft AP from an error, and if that doesn't work, it fallback to Bluetooth. Bluetooth is used for provisioning as well.
The only reason why many apps don't use it is because of buggy implementation, some phones require a full restart after using Wi-Fi Direct to fix connectivity issues, even Motorola's own product line with Smart Connect use it only with certain models, despite having Wi-Fi direct due to poor implementation (can be forced).
They even have a white list of supported adapter for the Windows app since direct is used as well, can be unofficially force enabled for Mediatek based adapters (rare on some laptops).
Back in 2016 things were much stable on Android phones with Wi-Fi Direct, even with old Blackberry, there were many apps including file managers that used it before it was essentially dropped, even for onboarding/provisioning apps like HP printers...
Apple's Airdrop success is about gaining traction, in the era of Wi-Fi Direct or other methods, most people were not aware of such features, as it required an app to be installed, they used email/messaging, even when Airdrop was first introduced and preinstalled, it took years for the average person to use it.
This. Localsend may be very useful for a set of devices you control or influence. The USP of Airdrop is ad hoc sharing with people you don't really know. Classic case is meeting strangers on holiday and you want to swap some photos of the trip you're on. One or both of you doesn't have data or time to install anything, or it's just too hard to persuade someone they should install random app. Pairing Bluetooth or setting up local networks is way too convoluted and time consuming.
With Airdrop you have trivially easy, "just works" sharing with people in proximity. It works great between iPhones and Pixel phones now they support it. It just needs support to spread to more Android devices.
> With Airdrop you have trivially easy, "just works" sharing with people in proximity.
Funny enough, I encounter so many problems trying to share things via AirDrop with friends, family, and even my own Apple devices that I just tell everyone to install LocalSend and I find that things work better.
I’m not sure why that is, because AirDrop used to work pretty well for me. But it’s been an exercise in frustration more often than not for me.
(Obviously, LocalSend works only as long as everyone is on the same network.)
Iroh is a relay protocol for peer to peer transfers over the Internet so it doesn't have this problem, check out my other comment here about wrappers around the protocol for sending files, Sendme is the one I use.
I don’t think this article is actually accurate. It seems like Google just reverse engineered airdrop rather than Apple changing the tech they use. Because quickshare works with all airdrop devices now. Not just ones recently updated.
it's widely expected Apple will find some way to lock it out
I suppose that is "widely expected" from the usual group of anti-Apple internet griefers looking for a reason to moan in public, rather than actually doing some research or knowing things.
To quote a sibling comment:
"Apple contributed the core logic to the Wi-Fi Alliance to build Wi-Fi Aware, which they now also support."
Not generally, I just don't have that specific phone that has implemented the workaround, and so this isn't a solution for me.
Apple has consistently done everything it can to self-sabotage their implementations of stuff to comply with EU anti-trust legislation like the stuff with digital marketplaces, so I'm not holding my breath on this.
Not only that, but with iOS 17.1 or later, AirDrop transfers will continue to work if you go out of Wi-Fi range during the transfer. It seamlessly switches to an Internet-based relay.
> The workaround I've found after switching to an Android device has been to teather my connection to my friend's device, which ends up creating a LAN that Localsend can work through, but this is not as nice an experience.
I'm honestly surprised that WiFi Hotspot doesn't isolate hosts, after companies like Meta have been caught running servers inside their apps and connecting to those to track users.
Yes exactly, that's why another RCE which will be found in Airdrop, if found by bad actor. Will be pretty fun to watch.
Last RCE in Airdrop, could be made into worm, it was found by whitehat, luckily for Apple there are still people, which are willing report exploits for little money, so billionaires can enjoy their life on yachts.
This works great for me to transfer stuff between my own devices in my home, but it's not an AirDrop replacement at all, so I don't know why they advertise it like that.
Look into Sendme [0] and AltSendme [1] (which is a GUI around the former), they use Iroh [2] which is an open-source encrypted peer-to-peer relay service to send data so there are no limits whatsoever for sending and receiving files, because there's no central server.
From my earlier comment about a similar thread a couple days ago about which file sharing apps people use [3]:
This kind of services that requires the user to share a seed/code to the recipient always seems kinda awkward to me. The code is not simple/short enough to be verbally communicated; If I can send the code, I usually can just send the file.
Recently started using it, it works really well and it's much more reliable than AirDrop. But the UX could be improved.
But I just wish Apple fixed AirDrop, every time I go to use I have so little confidence in it, it often doesn't see devices or if you have multiple Mac users it will confuse them, showing you the same Mac device twice without telling you which user it is
I'm curious, what do you people use this for? What are all these (presumably large) files that you guys are generating and transferring, that requires the use of apps like these?
Like in my case, the only files I generate on my phone are photos and videos, and these get backed up by Immich, which I can then share with someone by sending them a link to the files/album in question. I imagine normal folks would use iCloud or Google Photos for the same task.
For syncing other files like documents and such, I use ownCloud OCIS, and I'd imagine most other folks would use something like DropBox or iCloud, or even just email or WhatsApp the files.
For local network transfers of say ISOs or something, I'd just copy them over SMB, which is pretty much universal and doesn't need any special app. Or even just plug in a hard drive, if I'm doing backups.
For me, video is the main one. Sizes from 100MB - 3GB. Getting videos from an Apple device to an Android is a pain in the ass because I need to 2FA log in or click through something relatively convoluted (Dropbox, GDrive) or deal with pulling out some hardware I use once every 100 years (external drives). Localsend is a 2 or 3 click operation and very robust.
Silly apple. They should remove airdrop and tell users they have to rely on an internet connection and use whatsapp or email for quick, one-off file transfers between their iphones and macbooks.
Yup, for me I can see the device but when I try to initiate a send it just doesn't show up on the other device about half the time. I've not found a reliable way to fix it either, toggling AirDrop on and off on both devices seems the best way to fix it but only works like 70% of the time.
This application supports the following platforms: Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS, and FireOS. I was surprised. It is very interesting that it is implemented using a combination of REST API, HTTPS encryption, and local networking.
I love this software for its reliability (as compared to, say, KDE Connect, which I gave up on after years of frustrated use after it became clear that the developers did not believe there was an issue and it would never improve).
I do not love that it is a heavy electron app that takes many seconds to launch on my mid-spec machine and burns 20% of an entire CPU core the entire time it is running.
Why can't we have a simple command line tool that works?
No. It is using a central “well known server” and requires internet.
Test:
* Does it work in an airplane?
* Does it work in a submarine?
* Does it work in the mountains, when a thunderstorm is approach and you need to share the GPX?
Basically my Garmin Edge and iPhone can do this. Magic-Wormhole fails in all test cases.
Implementation shall be able to negoiate a connection locally (e.g. Bluetooth) and upgrade to peer-to-peer WiFi if need (Garmin doesn’t need that part, GPX are usually smaller than 1024 KB).
I use it on all my devices and tbh it's the absolute best option I found.
Previously I was using syncthing or had to install ftp server, used wormhole after packing all my files into one, etc. Android QuickShare never worked for me (wouldn't help me much with sending to the pc either).
It has some rough edges (ie: on multi-homed devices it's less that ideal to see the one octet that matters, when the list is very long scrolling whilst sending will cause the process to crap out), but other than that it's always reliable.
One of the most convenient aspects of Air Drop for me is that it selects the fastest available connection between the devices and ability to work without both devices being on the same network.
I tried on three phones, two of which are using the same account, I'm reasonably confident I am technically competent to not make silly mistakes, though the best I've achieved was endless wait.
I had better success with IR and BT file transfers. Hell, even spinning a local http server (with python -m http.server) works better than quick share.
It's not even close to the speed AirDrop has. This is not an alternative to AirDrop. I tried it multiple times but it's slow every time. These alternatives don't use the same technology.
It is an alternative. It just doesn't fulfill all the needs Airdrop does. I've had situation where I want to share a photo or a text file and it'll work great in that scenario.
I end up just opening a web server in termux on my phone and having the other side download from my hotspot every time i want to transfer a file because all the other android solutions really really suck.
I love this app, it's on all my devices, it's also written in my favourite cross platform development framework (dart/flutter). Very useful app, with a massive advantage of airdrop, no need for apple. Irrespective of if it's a drop in replacement.
Localsend is awesome! My team and I use it all the time for safely transmitting vpn configs, ssh keys, etc... It works flawlessly. The auto-generated names are pretty fun too.
I like kde connect, but find it randomly breaks every month or so and for the life of me cannot figure out why. A week or so later it starts working again.
came with omarchy pre installed, usedd it ever since. bonus points for it being open source too.
i was surprised it is written in flutter. looking at how mutli-platform it is, flutter was the more appealing choice.
They have web app but had terrible experience with it (can't find devices when you are using the mobile app and the other device is using the web app).
I'd love this to work but I always had trouble making it work on my google tv.
Wanted to share files (~2 gb files) from my Mac to my TV but the transfer kept failing
It’s not as slick as AirDrop and you have to sort of “prep“ both devices whenever you want to send/receive anything, it’s never just ready to go, but it’s incredibly reliable and will move anything from one machine to another. Just having that consistency across literally any device is so nice.
Because none of them actually match the capabilities of AirDrop, since they essentially require controlling the full stack (UI, low-level networking including Bluetooth for discoverability, Wi-Fi peer to peer connections without dropping any existing infrastructure connection etc.)
Many have tried, I don't think anyone has succeeded.
Supposedly the EU interoperability mandate will make this possible going forward, though? (The tricky part is usually not getting your device to speak some protocol, but to get Apple devices to actually respond to your attempts.)
I just use send(formerly FF send) and share a URL via chat or whatever: https://github.com/timvisee/send
With a CLI tool as well: https://github.com/timvisee/ffsend
My problem is that all these alternatives require the devices to be on the same local network.
One beauty of Airdrop is that it creates and handles that local network automatically under the hood (as far as I understand). So you could be out on a hike with friends and Airdrop something.
The workaround I've found after switching to an Android device has been to teather my connection to my friend's device, which ends up creating a LAN that Localsend can work through, but this is not as nice an experience.
The protocol Apple uses under the hood is AWDL (Apple Wireless Direct Link), which is a proprietary peer-to-peer layer that runs alongside your existing WiFi connection without dropping it. It uses a time-sliced channel-hopping mechanism so the radio can serve both infrastructure WiFi and the direct peer link simultaneously.
That's the part that's hard to replicate. LocalSend and most alternatives need an existing shared network because they're just TCP/IP, they have no way to negotiate a direct radio link without OS-level support. Even Android's QuickShare, which does peer-to-peer via WiFi Direct, drops your existing WiFi connection on older devices because the radio can only be associated with one BSS at a time.
The EU interoperability mandate lxgr mentions would theoretically require Apple to expose this, but AWDL interop would mean licensing or reverse-engineering some fairly deep radio scheduling logic, so I'd expect compliance via a different (probably slower) path.
>It uses a time-sliced channel-hopping mechanism so the radio can serve both infrastructure WiFi and the direct peer link simultaneously.
This seems like such a basic solution that I'm surprised that it isn't required by any of the mainstream standards before WiFi Aware. I wonder if this was some sort of a patent issue or similar.
Almost certainly patent related
It is entirely possible to inject (unrelated) wifi frames while being associated to a BSS without violating the existing 802.11 standards. That’s why Apple is able to implement AWDL on standard compliant wifi hardware.
However the path towards this type of interoperability would likely go through additional standardization via IEEE 802.11* and the Wi-Fi alliance. At which point Apple will need to implement and support the new standards. There is no need to reverse engineer AWDL to meet the new European interoperability requirements. What is needed is for wifi chipset OEMs to implement such standardization. Something pretty routine of them.
It can be expected that Apple will also maintain the proprietary AWDL in order to support their legacy devices.
> which is a proprietary peer-to-peer layer that runs alongside your existing WiFi connection without dropping it. It uses a time-sliced channel-hopping mechanism so the radio can serve both infrastructure WiFi and the direct peer link simultaneously.
Maybe a network nerd can chime in - is this implementation so difficult that it's unrealistic we'll see an OSS version?
I think the thing that makes an OSS implementation more difficult than iOS/macOS is the friction involved.
Say you've got an android phone, windows PC, and a linux box, and you want to be able to quickly drop files from each one. unless we get some kind of cooperation across all three platforms at the OS level, you'd at minimum need to install some kind of client into each system - when the nicest feature of airdrop is that it's baked into all of Apple's OSs, in my opinion. even if it worked exactly the same way, but had to be installed, I think it would see less use - and there's no real way for a single OSS project to do that across multiple OS platforms, to my knowledge
Not an expert on mobile development but I doubt an android app has the low-level access needed to the wifi stack to do this.
AWDL is such an amazing technology, it's understandable that Apple wants to keep it only for their devices as it gives them a noticeable advantage for quick stuff sharing.
They didn't. Apple contributed the core logic to the Wi-Fi Alliance to build Wi-Fi Aware, which they now also support.
Interestingly, it still took the EU to force them to actually adopt it (and open it up for apps to use) in iOS 26.
Kind of. When I looked, they added the api for devs to use on iOS, but it isn’t on macOS yet, and nothing uses it as far as I could see.
It’s a future promising tech though. A much better version of Wi-Fi Direct.
The EU required they use an open standard https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/the-eu-made-apple-ad...
also they use mDNS, which many programming languages, such as go, got it in their net library
This is misinformation, including most of the comments here, the majority of phones from 2014 support Wi-Fi Direct, and simultaneous group and station mode (2 BSS, yes even different channels). Even most Wi-Fi chips generally not just smartphones for a very long time. They stay connected to your home network.
When Quickshare drops your Wi-Fi connection, its not Direct anymore, that's just soft AP from an error, and if that doesn't work, it fallback to Bluetooth. Bluetooth is used for provisioning as well.
The only reason why many apps don't use it is because of buggy implementation, some phones require a full restart after using Wi-Fi Direct to fix connectivity issues, even Motorola's own product line with Smart Connect use it only with certain models, despite having Wi-Fi direct due to poor implementation (can be forced). They even have a white list of supported adapter for the Windows app since direct is used as well, can be unofficially force enabled for Mediatek based adapters (rare on some laptops).
Back in 2016 things were much stable on Android phones with Wi-Fi Direct, even with old Blackberry, there were many apps including file managers that used it before it was essentially dropped, even for onboarding/provisioning apps like HP printers...
Apple's Airdrop success is about gaining traction, in the era of Wi-Fi Direct or other methods, most people were not aware of such features, as it required an app to be installed, they used email/messaging, even when Airdrop was first introduced and preinstalled, it took years for the average person to use it.
Seems weird there is no 802.n variant to do this very popular thing
That's precisely what Wi-Fi Aware (NaN) is and it is heavily based on AWDL. It's even built into recent versions of iOS and Android.
I've never heard of Wi-Fi Aware, thanks for sharing. Are there any devices/chips that support it today?
iOS 26 supports it. I tried looking in to it and I couldn’t find anything using it yet though.
This. Localsend may be very useful for a set of devices you control or influence. The USP of Airdrop is ad hoc sharing with people you don't really know. Classic case is meeting strangers on holiday and you want to swap some photos of the trip you're on. One or both of you doesn't have data or time to install anything, or it's just too hard to persuade someone they should install random app. Pairing Bluetooth or setting up local networks is way too convoluted and time consuming.
With Airdrop you have trivially easy, "just works" sharing with people in proximity. It works great between iPhones and Pixel phones now they support it. It just needs support to spread to more Android devices.
> With Airdrop you have trivially easy, "just works" sharing with people in proximity.
Funny enough, I encounter so many problems trying to share things via AirDrop with friends, family, and even my own Apple devices that I just tell everyone to install LocalSend and I find that things work better.
I’m not sure why that is, because AirDrop used to work pretty well for me. But it’s been an exercise in frustration more often than not for me.
(Obviously, LocalSend works only as long as everyone is on the same network.)
For true crossplatform p2p the closest I have found is FlyingCarpet [1].
But it is not super reliable or friendly.
[1] https://github.com/spieglt/FlyingCarpet
Very cool, I didn't know about this. I'll watch it with interest.
Iroh is a relay protocol for peer to peer transfers over the Internet so it doesn't have this problem, check out my other comment here about wrappers around the protocol for sending files, Sendme is the one I use.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47935026
I don't want to send things over the internet, I want to do things locally.
I think nowadays on Android it's called QuickShare, and it works. But I believe the fragmentation and awareness is a part of the problem for Android.
Can't QuickShare cross-platform. My wife has an iPhone and my desktop and laptop are linux, so QuickShare is a non-solution for me.
rquickshare works on Linux and is 99% reliable for me, but I don't have a suggestion for iOS devices since I don't use them. https://github.com/Martichou/rquickshare/releases
Which alternatives are you using for AirDrop on Linux? I haven't been able to find a good one for this yet.
I've built my own, called KEIBIDROP :D but did not release the mobile apps let
https://github.com/KeibiSoft/KeibiDrop
I used to use Nitroshare, but Localsend has supplanted it.
Localsend and KDE Connect
KDE Connect works pretty great for sending files, though you do have to be on the same network.
QuickShare is compatible with AirDrop these days, thanks to EU regulations: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/the-eu-made-apple-ad...
I don’t think this article is actually accurate. It seems like Google just reverse engineered airdrop rather than Apple changing the tech they use. Because quickshare works with all airdrop devices now. Not just ones recently updated.
One Android phone supports it so far, and it's widely expected Apple will find some way to lock it out or at least delay more support.
it's widely expected Apple will find some way to lock it out
I suppose that is "widely expected" from the usual group of anti-Apple internet griefers looking for a reason to moan in public, rather than actually doing some research or knowing things.
To quote a sibling comment:
"Apple contributed the core logic to the Wi-Fi Alliance to build Wi-Fi Aware, which they now also support."
Glass half empty kinda guy, huh? :-)
Not generally, I just don't have that specific phone that has implemented the workaround, and so this isn't a solution for me.
Apple has consistently done everything it can to self-sabotage their implementations of stuff to comply with EU anti-trust legislation like the stuff with digital marketplaces, so I'm not holding my breath on this.
Not only that, but with iOS 17.1 or later, AirDrop transfers will continue to work if you go out of Wi-Fi range during the transfer. It seamlessly switches to an Internet-based relay.
try out this app called "Blip". It doesn't require you to be on the same network.
I am usually able to coerce a Localsend connection by using a WiFi hotspot on the target device.
Usually, but not always.
I literally said that in my comment:
> The workaround I've found after switching to an Android device has been to teather my connection to my friend's device, which ends up creating a LAN that Localsend can work through, but this is not as nice an experience.
If you're on a hike you can get on the same network by joining your friend's phone WiFi hotspot.
I literally said that in my comment. I also said it's not as nice an experience.
I'm honestly surprised that WiFi Hotspot doesn't isolate hosts, after companies like Meta have been caught running servers inside their apps and connecting to those to track users.
Wireguard VPN to your home network, and then you can do anything
"Check out this alternative road vehicle I invented: it works on most surfaces except it can't drive on inter-city roads."
"You could fix that by builing a rail track and using a train."
And everyone you ever want to share files with locally also has access to your home VPN?
That's an even worse solution than the hacky workaround of just teathering my internet connection.
The whole point of these solutions is to not have to transmit data over the internet, it should work over a local dynamic connection.
Yes exactly, that's why another RCE which will be found in Airdrop, if found by bad actor. Will be pretty fun to watch.
Last RCE in Airdrop, could be made into worm, it was found by whitehat, luckily for Apple there are still people, which are willing report exploits for little money, so billionaires can enjoy their life on yachts.
This works great for me to transfer stuff between my own devices in my home, but it's not an AirDrop replacement at all, so I don't know why they advertise it like that.
Look into Sendme [0] and AltSendme [1] (which is a GUI around the former), they use Iroh [2] which is an open-source encrypted peer-to-peer relay service to send data so there are no limits whatsoever for sending and receiving files, because there's no central server.
From my earlier comment about a similar thread a couple days ago about which file sharing apps people use [3]:
[0] https://github.com/n0-computer/sendme
[1] https://github.com/tonyantony300/alt-sendme
[2] https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47906587
This kind of services that requires the user to share a seed/code to the recipient always seems kinda awkward to me. The code is not simple/short enough to be verbally communicated; If I can send the code, I usually can just send the file.
And it works in the browser. https://web.localsend.org/
From windows to android to iOS.
Amazing! Though v1.18.0 hasn't dropped in F-droid yet
https://github.com/schlagmichdoch/pairdrop
A similar project but this one works entirely in the browser and can connect to clients beyond your local network with "public" rooms
Pairdrop is awesome! The docs are a bit hidden, the FAQ is at https://github.com/schlagmichdoch/pairdrop/blob/master/docs/... and the How-To for integration into Share menu on Android, iOS and Windows at https://github.com/schlagmichdoch/PairDrop/blob/master/docs/...
Hi,
I am late to the party, but I was also building in this space in the last year,
Basically I did a peer to peer filesystem named keibidrop: https://keibidrop.com/
I made it public last week. It does what local send does, but also via WAN. Still did not launch the mobile apps.
And 1 up is that it has also a virutal filesystem that is synced both ways.
repository is here: https://github.com/KeibiSoft/KeibiDrop
The code is open source, except for the UI, and I did benchmark on loopback vs localsend (local send is faster :D )
https://keibisoft.com/blog/keibidrop-benchmarks-vs-competiti...
and was also trying to get a commenting thread in /r/golang yesterday!
behind the hood I went with PQC, + gRPC + FUSE.
I feel like we need a spamsolutions.txt [1] for purported AirDrop replacements.
This one fails the "must not require an existing Wi-Fi network that both peers are connected to" criterion.
[1] https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
Recently started using it, it works really well and it's much more reliable than AirDrop. But the UX could be improved.
But I just wish Apple fixed AirDrop, every time I go to use I have so little confidence in it, it often doesn't see devices or if you have multiple Mac users it will confuse them, showing you the same Mac device twice without telling you which user it is
I'm curious, what do you people use this for? What are all these (presumably large) files that you guys are generating and transferring, that requires the use of apps like these?
Like in my case, the only files I generate on my phone are photos and videos, and these get backed up by Immich, which I can then share with someone by sending them a link to the files/album in question. I imagine normal folks would use iCloud or Google Photos for the same task.
For syncing other files like documents and such, I use ownCloud OCIS, and I'd imagine most other folks would use something like DropBox or iCloud, or even just email or WhatsApp the files.
For local network transfers of say ISOs or something, I'd just copy them over SMB, which is pretty much universal and doesn't need any special app. Or even just plug in a hard drive, if I'm doing backups.
So I don't understand why I should be using this.
For me, video is the main one. Sizes from 100MB - 3GB. Getting videos from an Apple device to an Android is a pain in the ass because I need to 2FA log in or click through something relatively convoluted (Dropbox, GDrive) or deal with pulling out some hardware I use once every 100 years (external drives). Localsend is a 2 or 3 click operation and very robust.
Luckily, Google enabled Airdrop inside of Quick Share so my phones and my MacBook and my Windows PC all can share now.
Silly apple. They should remove airdrop and tell users they have to rely on an internet connection and use whatsapp or email for quick, one-off file transfers between their iphones and macbooks.
my kid recently wanted to transfer a picture from an iPad drawing app to a windows laptop, I wish I knew about localsend for that
Have you tried troubleshooting those issues already? I had similar visibility issues in the past, but seems to always work now for me.
I think it initiates the connection over Bluetooth so if your Bluetooth is poor it isn’t going to work very well.
Yup, for me I can see the device but when I try to initiate a send it just doesn't show up on the other device about half the time. I've not found a reliable way to fix it either, toggling AirDrop on and off on both devices seems the best way to fix it but only works like 70% of the time.
This application supports the following platforms: Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS, and FireOS. I was surprised. It is very interesting that it is implemented using a combination of REST API, HTTPS encryption, and local networking.
Been using this on all my devices (macos, iPhone, iPad, android, windows) and love it!
I love this software for its reliability (as compared to, say, KDE Connect, which I gave up on after years of frustrated use after it became clear that the developers did not believe there was an issue and it would never improve).
I do not love that it is a heavy electron app that takes many seconds to launch on my mid-spec machine and burns 20% of an entire CPU core the entire time it is running.
Why can't we have a simple command line tool that works?
Just use the existing magic wormhole protocol. It works and has been deployed for a long time.
No. It is using a central “well known server” and requires internet.
Test:
Basically my Garmin Edge and iPhone can do this. Magic-Wormhole fails in all test cases.Implementation shall be able to negoiate a connection locally (e.g. Bluetooth) and upgrade to peer-to-peer WiFi if need (Garmin doesn’t need that part, GPX are usually smaller than 1024 KB).
As people have noted, the "local" part makes it hard.
Here's my question, y'all. What is the deal with the magic Syncthing uses and why can't we use it for stuff like this? And well, for everything?
(I've been doing this stuff for years and I still can't wrap my head around this question)
After switching to Linux, this was one of the very first applications I installed.
It really helped cement how great open source apps can be for me.
I use it on all my devices and tbh it's the absolute best option I found.
Previously I was using syncthing or had to install ftp server, used wormhole after packing all my files into one, etc. Android QuickShare never worked for me (wouldn't help me much with sending to the pc either).
It has some rough edges (ie: on multi-homed devices it's less that ideal to see the one octet that matters, when the list is very long scrolling whilst sending will cause the process to crap out), but other than that it's always reliable.
I'm very happy with it too.
For your own trusted devices on a LAN, you should try KDE Connect. KDE is not required.
What do you find to be better about it over LocalSend? (The website seems to be down)
One of the most convenient aspects of Air Drop for me is that it selects the fastest available connection between the devices and ability to work without both devices being on the same network.
I wonder if any of the alternatives do the same.
Quickshare does
Never worked for me, not even once.
I tried on three phones, two of which are using the same account, I'm reasonably confident I am technically competent to not make silly mistakes, though the best I've achieved was endless wait.
I had better success with IR and BT file transfers. Hell, even spinning a local http server (with python -m http.server) works better than quick share.
Posted here many times https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com/localsend
It's not even close to the speed AirDrop has. This is not an alternative to AirDrop. I tried it multiple times but it's slow every time. These alternatives don't use the same technology.
It is an alternative. It just doesn't fulfill all the needs Airdrop does. I've had situation where I want to share a photo or a text file and it'll work great in that scenario.
I end up just opening a web server in termux on my phone and having the other side download from my hotspot every time i want to transfer a file because all the other android solutions really really suck.
I love this app, it's on all my devices, it's also written in my favourite cross platform development framework (dart/flutter). Very useful app, with a massive advantage of airdrop, no need for apple. Irrespective of if it's a drop in replacement.
Localsend is awesome! My team and I use it all the time for safely transmitting vpn configs, ssh keys, etc... It works flawlessly. The auto-generated names are pretty fun too.
Lovely, but was replaced by KDE Connect for me. Connect works for iOS, macOS, Android, Linux, you name it.
I like kde connect, but find it randomly breaks every month or so and for the life of me cannot figure out why. A week or so later it starts working again.
List of browser based p2p file sharing tools https://gist.github.com/SMUsamaShah/fd6e275e44009b72f64d0570...
came with omarchy pre installed, usedd it ever since. bonus points for it being open source too. i was surprised it is written in flutter. looking at how mutli-platform it is, flutter was the more appealing choice.
D'accord.
Great app. I wish it supported PWA features like Web Share Targeting.
https://web.dev/articles/web-share
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/capabilities/web-apis/web-...
They have web app but had terrible experience with it (can't find devices when you are using the mobile app and the other device is using the web app).
https://github.com/localsend/web
I'd love this to work but I always had trouble making it work on my google tv. Wanted to share files (~2 gb files) from my Mac to my TV but the transfer kept failing
I used it, but it prevented my mac from sleeping. After some investigation I found it's local send.
Does it run in the background?
I use this all the time dropping files from old android device to mac, thanks devs!
I've been using this for years, simple, gets the job done. Nice UI.
Been using LocalSend for a few years, it works great even when sharing files between devices sharing a mobile connection.
I love local send. It’s ridiculously fast for sending large amounts of media too.
When multiple files are in transit, Localsend always transfers two at once.
Using it works perfectly for me!
Really cool! I used it a couple of times and did not expect it to work. But it worked. :D
It’s not as slick as AirDrop and you have to sort of “prep“ both devices whenever you want to send/receive anything, it’s never just ready to go, but it’s incredibly reliable and will move anything from one machine to another. Just having that consistency across literally any device is so nice.
So needed
Excuse my ignorance but why are there so many solutions like this? Especially if they aren't intercompatible (which I'm assuming they're not)
Because none of them actually match the capabilities of AirDrop, since they essentially require controlling the full stack (UI, low-level networking including Bluetooth for discoverability, Wi-Fi peer to peer connections without dropping any existing infrastructure connection etc.)
Many have tried, I don't think anyone has succeeded.
Supposedly the EU interoperability mandate will make this possible going forward, though? (The tricky part is usually not getting your device to speak some protocol, but to get Apple devices to actually respond to your attempts.)
The README and website certainly seem polished, but I haven't used the utility yet.
What's the main value prop over wormhole? That it works from the browser?
That you can send over 1000 files without it messing it up, and they'll end in the right place.
That you can set the recipient so it will auto-accept from the trusted senders.
And for me that in Android I can do Share to....localsend to do it faster than with wormhole.
Hey I use this. Works great. Ez.
i really wish Wi-Fi Direct succeeded
maybe eventually something like quickshare & airdrop mold into an interoperable thing but i'm not holding my breath