Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: I made an app people call "Airdrop for Android"

ubidrop.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 150 posts

Re: Show HN: I made an app people call "Airdrop for Android"

#22

Post by twodave »

catapart wrote: post #10

Oof! A very cool thing, solving a real problem I have, but if you're taking feedback on pricing: I could never justify paying for local filesharing. I've been this close to building my own version of something like this, multiple times over (and actually built a browser-based one as a way to learn .net core when that first started), because - like I said - it's a really handy utility. But I could only justify paying…

The chase for subscription revenue is destroying a lot of potentially-great software. Not just in pricing structure, but in how software is designed in the first place.

Compare this to something like Magnet, which is great software that I use almost every time I turn on my wife’s MacBook and costs $2. Once.

My guess is the people who made Magnet just aren’t getting rich off of it, but maybe we shouldn’t expect to get wildly rich from making a useful utility.

Re: Show HN: I made an app people call "Airdrop for Android"

#23

Post by seized »

ElongatedMusket wrote: post #12
FerretFred wrote: post #7

Check out LocalSend - it's multi platform. I use this all the time.

Thanks, I've been emailing myself photos in Gmail 5-6 at a time like a caveman for the past several years... any app I tried was a non-cross-platform disaster or cost too much and had major feature bloat. This looks dead simple.

SyncThing is a much better solution for that too.

For SyncThing-Fork has better options for controlling syncing based on network, battery level, etc.

Re: Show HN: I made an app people call "Airdrop for Android"

#24

Post by lwhi »

twodave wrote: post #22
catapart wrote: post #10

Oof! A very cool thing, solving a real problem I have, but if you're taking feedback on pricing: I could never justify paying for local filesharing. I've been this close to building my own version of something like this, multiple times over (and actually built a browser-based one as a way to learn .net core when that first started), because - like I said - it's a really handy utility. But I could only justify paying…

The chase for subscription revenue is destroying a lot of potentially-great software. Not just in pricing structure, but in how software is designed in the first place. Compare this to something like Magnet, which is great software that I use almost every time I turn on my wife’s MacBook and costs $2. Once. My guess is the people who made Magnet just aren’t getting rich off of it, but maybe we shouldn’t expect to get…

I love Magnet and also paid for it. Coming from Linux to Mac, I _rarely_ pay for any kind of utility .. but I did here. Maybe that says something in itself.

Subscriptions for desktop software sucks; but I can deal with yearly licenses .. assuming the app is maintained, you have a chance to actively consider the value you're getting before renewal. A subscription feels far more passive.

Re: Show HN: I made an app people call "Airdrop for Android"

#28

Post by seabass-labrax »

kajika91 wrote: post #17

KDE Connect has been around for at least 5 years : https://apps.kde.org/kdeconnect/ . It is quiet amazing and does way more than only file transfert : clipboard sharing, multimedia control, ping, messages, remote keyboard/mouse, etc.

> KDE Connect has been around for at least 5 years : https://apps.kde.org/kdeconnect/ . It is quiet amazing and does way more than only file transfert : clipboard sharing, multimedia control, ping, messages, remote keyboard/mouse, etc.

I also love KDE Connect; the clipboard sharing is so unobtrusive it feels almost magical. It takes less effort to copy and paste across my devices than it does between only Emacs and Vi on my desktop!

It seems to be not yet possible to share entire folders with KDE Connect, so I use Syncthing for that, which is also polished in its own, somewhat different way (more technical to use but optimised for large amounts of data).

Re: Show HN: I made an app people call "Airdrop for Android"

#29

Post by twodave »

lwhi wrote: post #24
twodave wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The chase for subscription revenue is destroying a lot of potentially-great software. Not just in pricing structure, but in how software is designed in the first place. Compare this to something like Magnet, which is great software that I use almost every time I turn on my wife’s MacBook and costs $2. Once. My guess is the people who made Magnet just aren’t getting rich off of it, but maybe we shouldn’t expect to get…

I love Magnet and also paid for it. Coming from Linux to Mac, I _rarely_ pay for any kind of utility .. but I did here. Maybe that says something in itself. Subscriptions for desktop software sucks; but I can deal with yearly licenses .. assuming the app is maintained, you have a chance to actively consider the value you're getting before renewal. A subscription feels far more passive.

I resonate with this. I can even stomach the JetBrains subscription if I rationalize that this is the equivalent for paying again for e.g. the 2024 edition. And they are good about letting you continue to use the software as of your last paid update.

I can’t rationalize paying monthly or even annually for something I expect to continue working exactly the same. Continued development on something like that almost guarantees it’s going to eventually change in a way I don’t want it to, anyway.

Edit: except in the cases where the monthly subscription is paying for supporting infrastructure, of course. That’s easy to rationalize.

Post reply on HN