41–50 of 114 posts
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There are no other tools that are as quite as paranoid as briar. There is a severe usability and practicality hit as a result. But if you have friends who interested and paranoid then it is quite worth it.
In other words, this is a very limited, niche market product.
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Just about every OS has built in ftp support except Android. Material Files is an Android file manager that adds the missing ftp support. Start/stop the ftp server with a single click. I have yet to find anything easier.
I'm pretty sure my parents would have no idea how to setup an ftp service on their phones but they do know how to use Bluetooth. Plus, non-iOS/Android feature phones don't have ftp support but they do have bluetooth so this cross-compatibility out of the box is another advantage.
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AFAIK there's still no standardized, non-proprietary, easy, out of the box way to share files between different phones brands/OS and/or PCs using WiFi as Android/Samsung/Apple each do their own thing here. You have to resort to setting up an ftp server and/or download extra apps on your phone for this, whereas Bluetooth file sharing is standardized and should work out of the box on any phone brand or OS (not sure on…
It can be done using WebRTC with something like snapdrop.net. Still requires both devices being able to connect to their signaling server, but at least it works on every device, doesn't require you to install something, it's peer to peer, and open source.
I call it the (grand)parents test. If they can't figure it out on their own then it's not user friendly enough.
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The use cases described are niche enough that iOS users can buy a second Android phone to use it with.
Or they could just use a different solution that supports both Android and iOS. Most people won't carry a second device for just one app.
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It can be done using WebRTC with something like snapdrop.net. Still requires both devices being able to connect to their signaling server, but at least it works on every device, doesn't require you to install something, it's peer to peer, and open source.
Sure, but take care as I said "easy, out of the box way" that any user can do, not the way that requires 5 years of sys-admin experience and 3 dev-ops certifications to pull off. I call it the (grand)parents test. If they can't figure it out on their own then it's not user friendly enough.
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I'm pretty sure my parents would have no idea how to setup an ftp service on their phones but they do know how to use Bluetooth. Plus, non-iOS/Android feature phones don't have ftp support but they do have bluetooth so this cross-compatibility out of the box is another advantage.
I know how to use Bluetooth --- and I generally find it harder to setup than the 1 click ftp server in Material Files.
That's why Apple is a multi-trillion dollar company. Because people want the easy way. If things require extra apps, extra steps and reading tutorials/instructions to use, you can bet most people will stop right there.
I'm not disagreeing with you, I'm just saying how things work for the masses.
I generally lean more toward “i like that iOS is locked down”, but this offline-app-sharing feature is one of the best arguments I’ve seen against that. That said, either I’d want peer-to-peer-shared apps to be signed by an entity I already highly trust, or that the sandbox containing the app was extremely solid (and preferably both of course).
It already says when you would use such functionality("might be useful during internet shutdowns or natural disasters").
Peer to Peer data transfer via computing devices is something I wish was be more mainstream. It's not, because the commercial cloud storage mafia has invested heavily in telling people that your data has to traverse their toll roads first. I recently discovered Syncthing Fork which was customizable in a way Google Drive or alternatives were not. And it's entirely P2P, transmitting files between my laptop and my phone…
How does it compares to Secure Scuttlebutt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Scuttlebutt ?
What I'd like to have is easy offline media files sharing across as many phone models as possible. Basically a free open-source alternative to ShareIt. Why it doesn't exist yet? Does ShareIt use some hidden and/or proprietary APIs?