I believe in the conspiracy theory that the reason connecting devices directly to each other anymore without doing a bunch of backflips through third parties is more or less intentional. If you could send a file to your friend sitting right next to you with some sort of wifi-direct or bluetooth or even just via usb-C cable that is seamless and actually works, it would impact every web service from facebook to onedrive. You also have a chilling effect on what kinds of data you’re going to share as well.
That said, tailscale is the ticket for me. The client is BSD licensed, and there exists a self-hostable server which is floss (headscale). Works like airdrop but better.
I think it’s probably less about restricting what you send and more about either making you use their cloud services so the data can be mined or a lack of desire to provide support for issues with local transfer.
either way, I believe it’s intentional as well.
That’s exactly what I’m saying. The reasons all exist on the spectrum from “we have no reason to care” to “We have every reason to make this difficult for you”
I miss the bluetooth option for sharing files :(
It’s rare that I actually want to use it and it was never anywhere near fast but it was a nice thing to have in my opinion and I am disappointed that it was removed
Edit: Nevermind, it’s still there. Maybe I was blind the last couple of times I looked for it
No Pairdrop?
This works for me, for any adhoc files I want to get to any device any time, any place…
For any regular file transfers, syncthing.
PSA: For any folks that have used snapdrop.net before, switch to this one ⤴️
The old URL got bought by Limewire NFT company and they started sending all files through their sketchy ass service. Pairdrop remains peer to peer.
I think the easiest way is sftp over tailscale, works over any distance, easy enough to setup, plenty of apps, ish for an iphoneterminal apk add openssh (idk how to dload there but you should be able to, can convert files locally using ffmpeg off an iphone, pretty great), termius/termix/neoserver for a more “modern” way to connect into the terminal and sftp. I prefer apps with a terminal jic I need to use it to convert something real quick on my pc.
love ssh, got me to appreciate and learn to use the terminal more, being able to use a pc without a de is such a good feeling
I rarely need to do it but what’s wrong with just plugging in a cable?
I don’t want an app to send files, I want to be able to rsync files to my phone like a normal computer.
I have data I want backed up so an rsync script sends it to a few different devices to keep multiple copies. I don’t want to manually drag/drop files for that, I just want my script to take care of it.
I think you can do that with Termux on Android.
Does that let you do it both ways? I want to run rsync from the desktop
Its basically a Linux terminal for your phone that can run rsync, so it should work both ways.
Just installed it now and this is so much better than the SSH app I used before. Now dumping like 40GB of backup data onto the tablets SD card. Got the tablet second hand, think the SD card cost more than the tablet did.
It’s really tragic and inelegant how we have to jump through hoops and bounce files around a wireless network when the USB cable is just sitting right there. What I had to do since rsync doesn’t work with mtp file paths was to install
android-file-transferand run the following with my phone connected via USB, but not already mounted by the file manager:aft-mtp-mount /path/to/mount/point rsync -a --progress --exclude 'Android/' '/path/to/mount/point/Internal shared storage/' '/path/to/backup/'You can also omit the
--exclude 'Android/'part as needed, I just didn’t want to copy over the quintillion tiny files under that directory.
KDE connect for me works very well. I even use it on my VR headset to share video recordings to my desktop then upload on my video server, really nice workflow.
It’s bizarre that you have to go through such lengths to do it w native Linux also like scp or rsync; they’re both Linux!!!
Android run on top of Linux. Once upon a time it was a Java VM sitting on a Linux kernel, it’s roots are still there though it’s blown up quite a bit since then.
It’s not entirely incorrect to say Linux is somewhere between a bootloader and a bios for Android.
