I found LocalSend to be significantly more reliable than Snapdrop. Also it doesn't require hosting.
Open Source
All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!
Useful Links
- Open Source Initiative
- Free Software Foundation
- Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Software Freedom Conservancy
- It's FOSS
- Android FOSS Apps Megathread
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to the open source ideology
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.
But can you use it to send to a device where you can't install stuff?
Where would that be?
If you want to send something to a computer in school or a work PC or something without admin rights.
snapdrop / sharedrop work in browser, without any installation, and that's the point. As much as I hate web apps, sometimes they are your only option.
I agree that localsend is great when you need to exchange files between your devices often, but when you quickly need to send a file to someone's PC without admin rights, snapdrop and sharedrop are a faster way to achieve that.
It’s easier to get someone to visit a website than to make them download an app
I prefer Sharedrop it allows transfer between networks and has a better up time
Also PairDrop. I tested a few of these sharing apps and found this one to be slightly better for reasons that I can no longer remember.
Idem
Are you selfhosting it? Were you able to set it up to work even with devices on different networks with turn/coturn server?
Not self hosting - just using the web app.
Oh, snapdrop is back? The site has been unreachable for years to me
It's been so unreliable. I switched to PairDrop.net, a fork that works just as well and has better uptime.
I currently use KDE Connect. Is it similar?
If I don't remember wrong, KDE Connect needs to be installed on both the devices you need to transfer file/text to/from, with Snapdrop (and PairDrop) you just need to selfhost it (or use the official website) without the need to install anything and they *can *work even when sender and receiver are on different network
thanks.
does it allow filesystem expose as well, or just sending files?
Just sending files
For people not satisfied with the reliability:
Me too, at the beginning.
But I have never had a problem when it is Android to Android.
After tinkering for a long while I found out that:
The connection is much more reliable after allowing mDNS in my firewall settings.
I don't know if this is related. If it is, I hope it was mentioned somewhere so users don't get frustrated when the app doesn't work.
In my OS, mDNS is blocked by default for public networks. (and every network is a public network by default.)
The firewall is preinstalled (firewalld
); the silver lining is that I understand more about firewalld
and appreciate its customizability.
Before this, I was only able to use ufw
.
What is the filesize limit? Is it better than Mozilla's list of Send instances or ToffeeShare?
There is no limit implemented, but it constantly failed to get an 8gb file to be transferred between two VMs. LocalSend is more reliable in my case.
i think there is no limit (at least on the software side), because it's local network only, so nothing is uploaded to a server but directly to the recipient. i could be wrong though.