Why bother paying for this when Localsend [0] exists on lots of platforms for free?
The pricing here doesn't make any sense nor justify paying for over free alternatives.
Show HN: I made an app people call "Airdrop for Android"
51–60 of 150 posts
Re: Show HN: I made an app people call "Airdrop for Android"
#52Oof! 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…
How demanding/complex upkeep is may be a big factor here.
For something like a single platform utility, the burden is relatively low because the number of things that can break is bounded (as long as public APIs are used, private API usage is another matter). With a Mac app like Magnet there’s one time each year chance of breakages occurring is high (new OS release), which devs are given several months ahead of time to find and fix.
Multiplatform apps obviously multiply that burden, with some platforms being more problematic than others — e.g. Android phones sometimes have weird per-device-model quirks that apps need to work around, which is not something one typically sees on Windows PCs, iPhones, or Macs.
Anything with an online/server component unavoidably needs to be babysat to keep running and secure, and the more functional that component is and the more surface it has exposed the more vigilant one needs to be. There’s also hosting costs, which can be quite high in the case of an independent dev who relies on cloud services to make up for lack of resources.
Which is all to say that it makes sense that a Mac-only tiny utility could more sustainably be a cheap one time purchase than many other types of project could be.
Re: Show HN: I made an app people call "Airdrop for Android"
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
I tried to use it with my linux laptop but it didn't work. It assumes you're in the same wifi and that the usual broadcasting works, right? This is not what airdrop does. Airdrop is fast and works by physical proximity. You don't need to be in the same wifi, just near each other. That's what makes it so useful, otherwise I could just use a cloud solutions as I usually have internet access when I'm in a wifi.
From the original post >Both devices need to be on the same WiFi network or Hot Spot to be able to see each other.
I didn't see that, too bad!
Re: Show HN: I made an app people call "Airdrop for Android"
#54Oof! 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…
If you want, I made a similar project in Flutter called "Foldie". It's based on adb, so it requires a cable. https://github.com/FLopriore/foldie
Re: Show HN: I made an app people call "Airdrop for Android"
#55A license covers "1 Mac OS device" - what about PC? Also, what happens once 1 year is up? Any upgrade discounts? Is old version still downloadable? Anyway, good job, I was in need of something like this recently and used LocalSend https://github.com/localsend/localsend , any notable differences between it and you app?
Not the OP, I've used LocalSend successfully (Mac and Android phone), it's great when it works but every now and then it's unable to find my phone to send stuff to.
Re: Show HN: I made an app people call "Airdrop for Android"
#56Earlier 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…
> The chase for subscription revenue is destroying a lot of potentially-great software. Phone OSes aren't nearly as well-optimized for backwards compatibility. Speaking as someone who works in this field, your phone app is almost never "done." Once you hit publish, you're signing up to continue providing updates for the life of the product. I've got binaries from the 90's that will run on Windows 11, no issues. But a…
Part of this is that it’s only been recently that mobile OSes have started to approach a similar level of maturity as their desktop counterparts, while also introducing and developing new concepts that desktop OSes never had (like permissions). For some number of years a high level of churn was inevitable.
As for the, “binary too old” thing on the Play store that could be a low effort way of weeding out apps with security vulnerabilities due to old dependencies. There isn’t really an equivalent on Windows for this because it doesn’t have any kind of centralized, hosted app management (at least that people actually use). It’s not uncommon for maintainers of Linux package manager repos to remove “abandoned” (as in hasn’t received any updates in X time) packages for similar reasons, leaving users who want them to source them elsewhere.
Re: Show HN: I made an app people call "Airdrop for Android"
#57KDE 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.
For me, KDE Connect for Android worked flawlessly, but I had to stop using it because of the battery drain it caused. (That was some years ago.)
Re: Show HN: I made an app people call "Airdrop for Android"
#58Re: Show HN: I made an app people call "Airdrop for Android"
#59KDE 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 tried to use it with my linux laptop but it didn't work. It assumes you're in the same wifi and that the usual broadcasting works, right? This is not what airdrop does. Airdrop is fast and works by physical proximity. You don't need to be in the same wifi, just near each other. That's what makes it so useful, otherwise I could just use a cloud solutions as I usually have internet access when I'm in a wifi.
When I see comments like this one, I think that we should do Show HN posts like: 'I intend to build an app Airdrop-for-Android, what are the most important features' ;-)
It feels like very often when I see a Show HN project, the HN comments point out some critical missing feature.
Re: Show HN: I made an app people call "Airdrop for Android"
#60Doesn't qualify as a "Show HN" - it's already been posted twice in the past few years and there's been no updates for more than a year [0]. Sounds like an attempt to get a few clicks by labelling it as "Show HN". [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
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