alt Hacker NewsLocalsend: An open-source cross-platform alternative to AirDrop
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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 did try this for syncing stuff between PCs, and have found the performance quite poor, like 10MB/s on a wired 10Gbe network. I don't know what the reason for this, but I suspect its networking layer is not really optimized.
In contrast, sftp did hundreds of MB/s
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.
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
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
And it works in the browser. https://web.localsend.org/
From windows to android to iOS.
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.
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 made websend to make it easier and secure to send images from phones to computers. It also allows automatically OCRing and cropping etc to turn a bunch of pictures into a proper pdf when there's no flatbed scanner around.
https://github.com/thiswillbeyourgithub/WebSend
Note that I'm currently refactoring it heavily (the code is awful currently).
LocalSend is the best app to transfer files from mobile to computer wireless that I have fund.
But it has one really big weakness/bug. When you transfer a file and it get interrupted, the half written file on the receiving end is not removed and you get an corrupted file. If you dont notice it, it could look like al files are transfered, but they are not. This is really bad, it is not how files should be "copied/transfered".
This is a great app! Simple and does the job.
The F1TV app is not available in my country on play store on my Google TV. The first time, I logged into the device using the android debugger to install the APK - I didn't want to use an ad-full app. Then I tried LocalSend, and it is now my default to send the APK from my mac to my android tv. Love the simple experience. Minor quirks in the UI, but gets the job done.
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.
List of browser based p2p file sharing tools https://gist.github.com/SMUsamaShah/fd6e275e44009b72f64d0570...
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
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.
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.
Seems like Localsend doesn't currently work reliably with Tailscale enabled. This is a bummer. Hope they also allow sending files between clients on the same tailnet, that'll be super neat.
Lovely, but was replaced by KDE Connect for me. Connect works for iOS, macOS, Android, Linux, you name it.
Unfortunately I can't use it in my office. Because for some reason the network there is designed in the way one computer can't see another even if there're on the same wifi. So basically if I setup a server on pc#1, I can't open pc#1.ip:port on pc#2. As a result Localsend doesn't work
Posted here many times https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com/localsend
One large past thread and two tinies:
Localsend: An open-source cross-platform alternative to AirDrop - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43343574 - March 2025 (1 comment)
Localsend: Open-Source Airdrop Alternative - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37938183 - Oct 2023 (229 comments)
Localsend: An open source cross-platform alternative to AirDrop - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34936796 - Feb 2023 (1 comment)
(Reposts are fine after a year or so; links to past threads are just to satisfy extra-curious readers)
Just use the existing magic wormhole protocol. It works and has been deployed for a long time.
This has been on my mind a lot as AirDrop has continuously failed to find devices on my network (no VPN enabled on either device, no weird routing or tunneling, even after flushing networking stuff).
Just set this up in a few minutes and it works a peach (quite fast, too). Just nudged me a little closer toward a "just use Linux" default.
I like LocalSend. It solves the problem of: I want a clean GUI to transfer files between mac, iPhone and Windows/Linux while developing software.
It doesn’t solve every edge case but I don’t need it to.
I'm retired now, but love seeing the new generation tackle age old problems. I built something similar to this (albeit, close sourced) about 12 years ago. It was called "bullet" and was aimed at transferring text based content using a custom stickies app.
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.
Everybody here is complaining about how this isn't as good as airdrop, and that may be true.
I have not really used airdrop, and this app is super useful to me.
There are packages for iOS app store, but it isn't in any Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora repo? Just snap/flatpak.
Am I correct in thinking community maintainers have little to no visibility therefore?
Additionally, is there any indication what source code is used to build an app store submission? Even a checksum?
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.
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?
Is there a firefox send alternative that can work on the cloudflare infra? I would like a low cost, deploy and forget service to send files to people
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.
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-...
I'm using it, it's great and interoperable. Win - Mac, Mac - android, whatever is your wish. Any combination. However on Mac it prevents the laptop from sleep for some reason
I would be curious how this behaves on messy home and office networks with client isolation, captive portals, and flaky multicast. That is usually where these otherwise elegant tools either earn trust or quietly fall apart.
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 used it, but it prevented my mac from sleeping. After some investigation I found it's local send.
- 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
I use local send when KDE connect isn’t working for me. The big problem with these is that you basically have to spend a minute or two setting up both devices to send.
I use this all the time dropping files from old android device to mac, thanks devs!
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.
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.
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.
I've been using this for years, simple, gets the job done. Nice UI.
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'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
Here's my take: https://aero.zip
End-to-end encrypted, no need to be on the same LAN, upload/download auto-resume, real-time transfers (start downloading before upload finishes), really fast (10 Gbps link, smart chunking).
Also zero-knowledge logins (via OPAQUE), passkey/2FA support, no AI training now or ever, GDPR compatible. 2 GB transfers are free.
Does this use libp2p[0]?
[0]: https://libp2p.io/
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.