Hey,
I was wondering what folks use to quickly send a file or a link between your PC and android phone in a lightweight and self hosted way.
Currently I use syncthing to copy files around, but I’m looking for something more immediate, and quick than doesn’t involve searching for folders in a file manager.
Example use case: Send a file from PC to phone. Notification pops up on phone, tap it to access.
(PC runs OpenBSD)
What lightweight software do you guys use?
Stuff I tried so far:
- syncthing
- xmpp
- tox
- scp and termux.
- magic wormhole
- telegram saved messages
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Here are a bunch of local services I’ve used at one point or another from phone to PC or PC to PC. Not sure if any links are out of date.
KDE Connect
Wormhole (Closed Source)
- Site: https://wormhole.app/
LocalSend
- Site: https://localsend.org/
- Source: https://github.com/localsend/localsend
SnapDrop
- Site: https://snapdrop.net/
- Source: https://github.com/RobinLinus/snapdrop
ShareDrop
- Site: https://www.sharedrop.io/
- Source: https://github.com/szimek/sharedrop
FilePizza
- Site: https://file.pizza/
- Source: https://github.com/kern/filepizza
Original Wormhole
- Site: https://webwormhole.io/
- Source: https://github.com/saljam/webwormhole
PeerTransfer
JustBeamIt
- Site: https://justbeamit.com
- Source: https://github.com/justbeamit/beam
Send Visee
- Website: https://send.vis.ee/
- Source: https://github.com/timvisee/send
- List of instances at: https://github.com/timvisee/send-instances
+1 KDE Connect. File transfer works great on Android, Linux, and even on Windows 10/11! Clipboard sync is also a game changer; super easy to copy and paste across devices.
Hey wormhole is closed source? Wow I didn’t knew that.
There are two, the original open source version and its forks, and then the closed source version.
+1 for LocalSend. Well worth checking out.
+1 Love LocalSend!
I use KDEConnect. I don’t know about iPhone but it works with Android, Linux and Windows.
I have tried to use KDEconnect over and over, It doesn’t work on my work network, it doesn’t work on most of my home network, If my laptop my cell phone come up as different IPs it gets confused. It’s discoverability is just absolutely horrible except for a select number of plain vanilla networks.
Damn that sucks :(. Seems to me I have to disable my VPN in order to discover devices, but I can re-enable it afterwards. I use it mostly for clipboard sharing between devices.
I love localsend.
Works on Linux, Android, iOS, Windows, and Mac. It is basically an OS agnostic Airdrop.
It’s FOSS, so you can go to the Github and build from source for OpenBSD, but I have no idea if that would work.
Dart (the language it’s written in) doesn’t work on BSD, so sadly that’s out of the question for now.
Dang, that’s too bad. Hopefully one day!
I usually use kde connect.
KDE Connect also works on Gnome, Windows and Android. I can’t recommend it enough. Transfering a single image from phone to PC is instantaneous
And having a unified clippboard is just so convenient
Taildrop works relatively well for most all circumstances. Only thing is you gotta use trayscale or cli currently for sending files from a Linux/bsd machine. I don’t know if opened has a port for trayscale but it definitely has a port of tailscale.
I often spin up a quick python http server. Just go to the folder which has the files you want to transfer and run the following command:
python3 -m http.server. This will server the folder contentServing HTTP on 0.0.0.0 port 8000 (http://0.0.0.0:8000/) .... On your phone you can then browse to http://PC_IP:8000 and download what you want/need.Is it safe though?
Safe as in encrypted and/or authenticated? Not at all! I only do this on networks I fully trust and with files that are not too sensitive. But it’s quick and easy to set up. All my machines have python installed so hence the idea.
Too much typing, especially if transferring from phone to computer.
Thanks though.
Open source file manager Material Files lets you set an SSH server as a bookmark and mount it instantly. Moving files around just like like it’s native. Works seamlessly through Tailscale.
I mean, the fastest method is likely to just plug the phone into PC and pretend it’s a flash drive?
Do you have any hosting in your home lab? Preferably something for running a docker container, but a hypervisor could do the job too.
Nextcloud is an option if you do. Technically speaking you could properly protect it and make it public. You don’t have to do that though. Any file you upload on your computer could be copied to your phone or vice versa. If it’s public, then this could be done from anywhere.
Yes, I have a Linux vm for docker. I’ve chucked up a pairdrop container. So easy.
Can’t say I’ve used that… Yet. I like nextcloud because besides being compatible with Linux/Windows and having an Android app, it also has a simple web UI to access the files. It’s probably closer to self hosted OneDrive than anything else I can think of. Kinda like the simplicity of pairdrop though.
I ll just hijack this thread : when plugging my android into laptop, the laptop doesn’t recognise it as anything. And the phone doesn’t give me the option to “share files” instead of just charge. Does anyone knows what’s wrong?
Check if your cable has data lanes, some cables don’t have them and can only be used for charging. Tap the charging notification and check if you can change it to file transfer.
