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.
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.
it might be interesting to use unused or extra wifi cards to support this. My pc motherboard has both wifi and ethernet and I only use the ethernet. That card does absolutely nothing at all.
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.
AFAIK, Wi-Fi Aware / Neighbourhood Aware Networking is basically the "standardised" version of AirDrop, and as of 2025, iOS's Airdrop transparently inter-operates with it.
There is an open standard for that which is included in Apple devices since the iPhone 15. google implements it since the pixel 3. It’s called NAN. There are no WiFi cards available for consumers to buy which expose that as part of their firmware sadly. But wpa_supplicant has implemented part of the standard.
> 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
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.
Speaking of ad-hoc communication channels that do not require shared infrastructure: I like the idea of https://github.com/divan/txqr which sends data using animated QR codes. An ultimate guarantee of physical proximity. The bandwidth is not comparable to WiFi 6, of course, but no OS support is required.
Right, the first two steps are what make AirDrop, "AirDrop". This isn't an alternative at all if it requires both devices to already be connected to the same WiFi.
AirDrop is fantastic for sharing files with people you don't know/just met - if we have to find and agree to join the same wifi before we interact we are no longer talking about the same feature.
If Apple's AirDrop implementation had required people to join the same WiFi first, the feature would never have taken off the way it has among non-techy users. I'm still today mildly surprised I can use AirDrop as a verb in conversation and most of the time the other party knows what I mean.
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.
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.)
True. But I mean these are photos (from strangers that you aren’t even willing to exchange phone numbers with?). It is a really non-essential feature anyway, so most likely everybody who doesn’t have an Apple device skips it.
Airdrop is also pretty weird: sometimes it can’t find other phones (probably when a previous transfer failed silently in the background). Also, it had some issues searching for contacts when there was no mobile/Wi-Fi connection (tried to send photos to another phone in the mountains). Sometimes it could just freeze and not work… Apple magic here isn’t really useful.
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.
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.
Bluetooth is also very slow. Airdrop and Localsend achieve speed by using local wifi networks. The problem with Localsend is that the user themselves need to manage the creation of the local network.
I've recently started using blip, which works very similarly to airdrop after the initial pairing has happened. The devices do not need to be on the same network etc.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Not necessarily. For example I might have a few gigs of photos to send someone, and I want to send them uncompressed. I could text someone the seed or QR code for them to download the photos, but I can't send those photos (especially uncompressed, even if over RCS or WhatsApp) over text.
I'll need to give this a shot. I have Localsend installed for sending thing between my iPhone and Linux desktop, but it doesn't always play nice. Even with the Localsend port open in Firewalld it can take upwards of 10 minutes for the devices to see each other. A browser solution should at least have faster discovery.
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.
Sending plain text from one device to another. I was debugging my steamdeck and I send code snippet from desktop chatgpt to steamdeck using Localsend to run. Then I send the debug output (also plaintext) back to desktop to ask chatgpt what to try next. Other than this, random small files from time to time. The app is lightweight and just works.
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.
The closest I found to AirDrops ease of use is Blip https://blip.net/. Works like charm, supported on pretty much all platforms, works on local and non-local networks (P2P) and has no file size limit. I was pretty surprised it's free for personal use.
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.
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.
For years I have been syncing with great success using the most basic FOSS tools: `rsync` over `sshfs` on desktop, and SSHD (via an app called Dropbear available on F-Droid) on mobile, using an ad-hoc network over the wifi hotspot (which is turned on by Macrodroid - alas not FOSS - when the device is plugged in). This setup is rock-solid reliable and very fast.
Blip definitely has a better UX and it's nice that it can transfer between networks through their servers (obviously don't be sending sensitive stuff cause who knows how much they can be trusted)
But I consider my usage of it to be on borrowed time cause there's no way they're gonna let everyone forever beam unlimited data through their servers forever. They're accumulating users before they make you pay, it's just a matter of time. But I'm enjoying it while I can.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
To send files locally why not set up a wifi hotspot?
Then you can transfer files to and from uncool people with Android or Linux phones/computers using localsend.
I've never found this difficult and often use hotspots when I'm overseas - it's cheaper to get internet for one phone and share it with the others for example.
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.)
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.
Both Samsung and Google already did it. My S26 Ultra supports Airdrop and I've tested it by sending and receiving photos with iPad
Is this upstreamed in AOSP?
>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
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.
PSA:
* https://www.wi-fi.org/wi-fi-aware-resources
* https://developer.apple.com/documentation/WiFiAware
* https://developer.android.com/develop/connectivity/wifi/wifi...
So, should there be apps that use it to transfer files between iOS, Android, Windows, and Mac without requiring them to be on the same network?
No WiFi cards for pcs support it.
it might be interesting to use unused or extra wifi cards to support this. My pc motherboard has both wifi and ethernet and I only use the ethernet. That card does absolutely nothing at all.
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...
Except 20% of the time it just doesn’t work. Hardly an advantage if most people default to texting because of airdrop’s failure rate
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.
AFAIK, Wi-Fi Aware / Neighbourhood Aware Networking is basically the "standardised" version of AirDrop, and as of 2025, iOS's Airdrop transparently inter-operates with it.
There is an open standard for that which is included in Apple devices since the iPhone 15. google implements it since the pixel 3. It’s called NAN. There are no WiFi cards available for consumers to buy which expose that as part of their firmware sadly. But wpa_supplicant has implemented part of the standard.
> 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.
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.
also they use mDNS, which many programming languages, such as go, got it in their net library
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.
Wait did they actually name it NaN or is that a joke?
NAN, not NaN. NaN is parent's editorialization or muscle memory.
Oh; I thought maybe it just didn’t have an 802 type name so it might have just been a little joke.
Anyway, good to know we can use our NAN signal to send signal NaNs!
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
Thanks for the tip. Just tried it and it worked great between MacOS and Android.
Make sure to also try PairDrop https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47935875
It's a pretty polished PWA you don't even need to install as it uses WebRTC P2P streaming in the local network or via TURN over internet.
So a good solution for ad-hoc file sharing without ad-hoc network.
Very cool, I didn't know about this. I'll watch it with interest.
Speaking of ad-hoc communication channels that do not require shared infrastructure: I like the idea of https://github.com/divan/txqr which sends data using animated QR codes. An ultimate guarantee of physical proximity. The bandwidth is not comparable to WiFi 6, of course, but no OS support is required.
With color it would be even faster! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Capacity_Color_Barcode
Indeed, Localsend only does the last step of what Airdrop does. With Localsend, you need to:
- Create an ad-hoc Wi-Fi network on one device.
- Connect the other device(s) to that Wi-Fi network.
- Now run Localsend.
The first two steps are a bit of a drag, and the fact that Airdrop handles it is what makes it so frictionless to use.
Right, the first two steps are what make AirDrop, "AirDrop". This isn't an alternative at all if it requires both devices to already be connected to the same WiFi.
AirDrop is fantastic for sharing files with people you don't know/just met - if we have to find and agree to join the same wifi before we interact we are no longer talking about the same feature.
If Apple's AirDrop implementation had required people to join the same WiFi first, the feature would never have taken off the way it has among non-techy users. I'm still today mildly surprised I can use AirDrop as a verb in conversation and most of the time the other party knows what I mean.
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.
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.)
setting up local networks is so trivial compared to forcing everyone to buy an Apple gizmo.
True. But I mean these are photos (from strangers that you aren’t even willing to exchange phone numbers with?). It is a really non-essential feature anyway, so most likely everybody who doesn’t have an Apple device skips it.
Airdrop is also pretty weird: sometimes it can’t find other phones (probably when a previous transfer failed silently in the background). Also, it had some issues searching for contacts when there was no mobile/Wi-Fi connection (tried to send photos to another phone in the mountains). Sometimes it could just freeze and not work… Apple magic here isn’t really useful.
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.
Feem is the only reliable one I've found that doesn't rely on being on the same local network
It works on iOS and Android
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.
bluetooth is local. Actually, I realise I'm being facetious since I've not managed to get Apple bluetooth to connect to anything non Apple yet.
Bluetooth is also very slow. Airdrop and Localsend achieve speed by using local wifi networks. The problem with Localsend is that the user themselves need to manage the creation of the local network.
I've recently started using blip, which works very similarly to airdrop after the initial pairing has happened. The devices do not need to be on the same network etc.
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.
try out this app called "Blip". It doesn't require you to be on the same network.
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.
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.
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.
Not necessarily. For example I might have a few gigs of photos to send someone, and I want to send them uncompressed. I could text someone the seed or QR code for them to download the photos, but I can't send those photos (especially uncompressed, even if over RCS or WhatsApp) over text.
The code can be easily communicated as a QR code. But a 100 MB file cannot.
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
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
I'll need to give this a shot. I have Localsend installed for sending thing between my iPhone and Linux desktop, but it doesn't always play nice. Even with the Localsend port open in Firewalld it can take upwards of 10 minutes for the devices to see each other. A browser solution should at least have faster discovery.
Should have been called PearDrop
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/...
They forked sharedrop after it and snapdrop got acquired and enshittified by LimeWire, whoever that is now.
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43143559
Submitted on its own: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47935875
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.
Sending plain text from one device to another. I was debugging my steamdeck and I send code snippet from desktop chatgpt to steamdeck using Localsend to run. Then I send the debug output (also plaintext) back to desktop to ask chatgpt what to try next. Other than this, random small files from time to time. The app is lightweight and just works.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
The closest I found to AirDrops ease of use is Blip https://blip.net/. Works like charm, supported on pretty much all platforms, works on local and non-local networks (P2P) and has no file size limit. I was pretty surprised it's free for personal use.
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
Also https://wormhole.app/, but feross is busy witch Socket and the myriad of NPM supply chain attacks nowadays
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.
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's faster than the standard wireless transfer speed between my iPhone and my Windows PC (0 KB/s)
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.
Probably the main "feature" AirDrop has is speed. Other alternatives should include that "feature".
No it isn't? The main feature is sending things peer to peer.
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).
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.
For years I have been syncing with great success using the most basic FOSS tools: `rsync` over `sshfs` on desktop, and SSHD (via an app called Dropbear available on F-Droid) on mobile, using an ad-hoc network over the wifi hotspot (which is turned on by Macrodroid - alas not FOSS - when the device is plugged in). This setup is rock-solid reliable and very fast.
I found blip works better on ios and windows. Not losing transfers midway like localsend.
Blip definitely has a better UX and it's nice that it can transfer between networks through their servers (obviously don't be sending sensitive stuff cause who knows how much they can be trusted)
But I consider my usage of it to be on borrowed time cause there's no way they're gonna let everyone forever beam unlimited data through their servers forever. They're accumulating users before they make you pay, it's just a matter of time. But I'm enjoying it while I can.
Posted here many times https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com/localsend
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.
List of browser based p2p file sharing tools https://gist.github.com/SMUsamaShah/fd6e275e44009b72f64d0570...
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?
It’s open source so you can put together that CLI yourself if so motivated
- pro tip, if you want to send a directory, compress it as an archive and send i
- for whatever reason, even the same sized directory takes much much longer than its corresponding archive version when using this tool
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.
I was using Localsend a bunch for Window <> iPhone before, really great product without hassle.
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.
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.
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
Using LocalSend to send files across iOS, Mac and Windows. When everything is on the local network, it works pretty nicely.
I swear there's a new one of these every year. Not a single one sticks around.
I've been using LocalSend for quite some time now, after hearing about it for years. It's not a new one.
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.
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.
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 used it, but it prevented my mac from sleeping. After some investigation I found it's local send.
Does it run in the background?
To send files locally why not set up a wifi hotspot?
Then you can transfer files to and from uncool people with Android or Linux phones/computers using localsend.
I've never found this difficult and often use hotspots when I'm overseas - it's cheaper to get internet for one phone and share it with the others for example.
Are you lost? This is a post about Localsend...
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 use this all the time dropping files from old android device to mac, thanks devs!
Been using this on all my devices (macos, iPhone, iPad, android, windows) and love it!
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.
Why not use WebRTC? 0 download.
(I'm all for alternatives to AirDrop. I'm all for AirDrop inter-operability. Nothing against those things.)
For LAN file sharing, you can do it with any browser. Implementations like: https://sendfiles.dev/ (though there are many others)
Really cool! I used it a couple of times and did not expect it to work. But it worked. :D
What do you guys think about an AI that has Multi agents personal assistance agentic commander all in one place..??
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.
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)
Using it works perfectly for me!
So needed
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
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.