Live data from Hacker News

Free and Open Source Alternative to Airdrop

sharedrop.io

151–156 of 156 posts

Re: Free and Open Source Alternative to Airdrop

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great project! Thank you for building it. If the UI was simpler and more "Apple-like" (hate to say this) I could convince my non-tech coworkers/family/friends to use it. Also, could you auto detect the other peer's OS? You could skip an extra step and UI element. Do you need it to know which WiFi bandwidth to use?

Thank you! Yeah, obviously the UI is a weak part. I'd like to improve it eventually but as a one-person project I don't want it to have as minimal of an interface as AirDrop. With all the ways transfers can go wrong, I want that information to be in the user's face so they can submit issues and I can help debug easily. And no, it can't detect anything about the other device until they're on a WiFi network together, a…

So how would a transfer between two iOS devices work? Neither would be able to create the hotspot, right?

Re: Free and Open Source Alternative to Airdrop

#152
post #62
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC Apple uses some proprietary radio protocol (or maybe it’s just Bluetooth) to discover and communicate with nearby Apple products.

It uses Bonjour [1], which has an LGPL reimplementation named Avahi [2] [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonjour_(software) [2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avahi_(software)

It can’t use just bonjour.

Apple devices can detect out of network devices as well.

Re: Free and Open Source Alternative to Airdrop

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great project! Thank you for building it. If the UI was simpler and more "Apple-like" (hate to say this) I could convince my non-tech coworkers/family/friends to use it. Also, could you auto detect the other peer's OS? You could skip an extra step and UI element. Do you need it to know which WiFi bandwidth to use?

Thank you! Yeah, obviously the UI is a weak part. I'd like to improve it eventually but as a one-person project I don't want it to have as minimal of an interface as AirDrop. With all the ways transfers can go wrong, I want that information to be in the user's face so they can submit issues and I can help debug easily. And no, it can't detect anything about the other device until they're on a WiFi network together, a…

Thank you for the detailed explanation, it's not my specialty yet really fun to scratch a bit of the surface in other aspects :)

Re: Free and Open Source Alternative to Airdrop

#155
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying to learn how to use Tiktok (yes, I know, I'm sorry) and other social media and cross-posting isn't really great and some platforms pretty much force you to post from mobile devices or vice versa (Tiktok, Instagram for mobile, LinkedIn for desktop web), and I need to pass source videos from mobile to editors on PC and back and forth for posting on the different media.. It's a big of a mess, I'm kinda sure t…

Do consider Syncthing particularly if you are using Android. If using apple iOS you'd need the möbius sync client. https://syncthing.net/ https://www.mobiussync.com/ One thing that it beats the cloud / centralized sync on is because the connection is direct between devices when the initial transfer is completed the file is completely there on the other device. With a cloud type of sync you do the transfer twice. I've…

Update: I love it, so good!

Re: Free and Open Source Alternative to Airdrop

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! Yeah, obviously the UI is a weak part. I'd like to improve it eventually but as a one-person project I don't want it to have as minimal of an interface as AirDrop. With all the ways transfers can go wrong, I want that information to be in the user's face so they can submit issues and I can help debug easily. And no, it can't detect anything about the other device until they're on a WiFi network together, a…

So how would a transfer between two iOS devices work? Neither would be able to create the hotspot, right?

Correct, Flying Carpet doesn't work for Apple-to-Apple transfers, but AirDrop already fills this need.
Post reply on HN