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Localsend: An open-source cross-platform alternative to AirDrop

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Re: Localsend: An open-source cross-platform alternative to AirDrop

#101

Post by coldstartops »

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.

Re: Localsend: An open-source cross-platform alternative to AirDrop

#102

Post by satvikpendem »

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

[2] https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47906587

Re: Localsend: An open-source cross-platform alternative to AirDrop

#103

Post by joenot443 »

SingleSourceAI wrote: post #40
eigenspace wrote: post #28

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 u…

[flagged]

> which is a proprietary peer-to-peer layer that runs alongside your existing WiFi connection without dropping it. It uses a time-sliced channel-hopping mechanism so the radio can serve both infrastructure WiFi and the direct peer link simultaneously.

Maybe a network nerd can chime in - is this implementation so difficult that it's unrealistic we'll see an OSS version?

Re: Localsend: An open-source cross-platform alternative to AirDrop

#104

Post by satvikpendem »

eigenspace wrote: post #28

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 u…

Iroh is a relay protocol for peer to peer transfers over the Internet so it doesn't have this problem, check out my other comment here about wrappers around the protocol for sending files, Sendme is the one I use.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47935026

Re: Localsend: An open-source cross-platform alternative to AirDrop

#105

Post by lakshyanoir »

eigenspace wrote: post #28

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 u…

try out this app called "Blip". It doesn't require you to be on the same network.

Re: Localsend: An open-source cross-platform alternative to AirDrop

#106

Post by coldstartops »

Xantier wrote: post #42
eigenspace wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't QuickShare cross-platform. My wife has an iPhone and my desktop and laptop are linux, so QuickShare is a non-solution for me.

Which alternatives are you using for AirDrop on Linux? I haven't been able to find a good one for this yet.

I've built my own, called KEIBIDROP :D but did not release the mobile apps let

https://github.com/KeibiSoft/KeibiDrop

Re: Localsend: An open-source cross-platform alternative to AirDrop

#107

Post by ghosty141 »

joenot443 wrote: post #103
SingleSourceAI wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> which is a proprietary peer-to-peer layer that runs alongside your existing WiFi connection without dropping it. It uses a time-sliced channel-hopping mechanism so the radio can serve both infrastructure WiFi and the direct peer link simultaneously. Maybe a network nerd can chime in - is this implementation so difficult that it's unrealistic we'll see an OSS version?

Not an expert on mobile development but I doubt an android app has the low-level access needed to the wifi stack to do this.

Re: Localsend: An open-source cross-platform alternative to AirDrop

#108

Post by coldstartops »

SingleSourceAI wrote: post #40
eigenspace wrote: post #28

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 u…

[flagged]

also they use mDNS, which many programming languages, such as go, got it in their net library

Re: Localsend: An open-source cross-platform alternative to AirDrop

#109

Post by granthum »

joenot443 wrote: post #103
SingleSourceAI wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> which is a proprietary peer-to-peer layer that runs alongside your existing WiFi connection without dropping it. It uses a time-sliced channel-hopping mechanism so the radio can serve both infrastructure WiFi and the direct peer link simultaneously. Maybe a network nerd can chime in - is this implementation so difficult that it's unrealistic we'll see an OSS version?

I think the thing that makes an OSS implementation more difficult than iOS/macOS is the friction involved.

Say you've got an android phone, windows PC, and a linux box, and you want to be able to quickly drop files from each one. unless we get some kind of cooperation across all three platforms at the OS level, you'd at minimum need to install some kind of client into each system - when the nicest feature of airdrop is that it's baked into all of Apple's OSs, in my opinion. even if it worked exactly the same way, but had to be installed, I think it would see less use - and there's no real way for a single OSS project to do that across multiple OS platforms, to my knowledge

Re: Localsend: An open-source cross-platform alternative to AirDrop

#110

Post by eigenspace »

satvikpendem wrote: post #104
eigenspace wrote: post #28

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 u…

Iroh is a relay protocol for peer to peer transfers over the Internet so it doesn't have this problem, check out my other comment here about wrappers around the protocol for sending files, Sendme is the one I use. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47935026

I don't want to send things over the internet, I want to do things locally.
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