LocalSend: Open Source Cross-Platform Alternative to AirDrop

Via David Smith on Mastodon, who writes:

The recent work I’ve been doing has required a lot of sharing files between testing devices (and my Mac). AirDrop should be the ideal tool for this but I’ve recently found it to be unreliable.

Instead I’ve been using LocalSend which is an open-source AirDrop alternative and it’s been working fantastically. The only real downside is that you have to open the app on both sides for the share to complete, but it has been 100% reliable so that’s a tradeoff I’ll happily make.

Somehow I’d never heard of LocalSend before, but I just gave it a quick test drive and it works like a charm. It’s got clients for Mac, iOS, Android, Linux, and Windows — and the Mac client is available both in the App Store and via the web. No middleman in the cloud — transfers are peer-to-peer, and the whole project is open source with an active community on GitHub.

When I dick around with my Android burner phone, I often find myself sorely missing AirDrop and Continuity. Sometimes I just want to move the contents of my clipboard from one device to the other — LocalSend makes that easier than anything else I’ve seen.

I’m not even sure Smith’s “downside” is really a downside. I understand why AirDrop works the way it does (always-on in the background), but I wouldn’t want LocalSend to work that way. I like the explicitness of opening it on both devices.

Just an outstanding project from developer Tien Do Nam. Free of charge, open source, and no ads — the only funding is via an in-app tip jar, which I just gladly dropped some bills in.

★ Friday, 31 January 2025