Localsend: An Open Source Airdrop Alternative

Key Takeaways

just the other day I was scrolling through orange Reddit and I came across this local send an open- Source airdrop alternative now at this stage I don't exist within the Apple ecosystem but I've always thought the idea of airdrop sounded like a super convenient and really streamlined function so I thought hey let's go and try this thing out if it's a waste of time it's a waste of time but to my surprise this works really really well and I've had basically no issues with it now I'm going to be going between my Android phone and my Linux desktop we have Android on the left Linux on the right this is not a limitation of the application it's just what I have in front of me I'll show you all of the other clients a bit later so when you open up the application you'll be presented with an ID in this case we have pretty strawberry 50 on the phone and neat avocado 55 on the desktop this is a mostly randomly assigned name there's like a list of acceptable terms but for all intent and purposes it is a randomly assigned name at least by default this name can be changed if we go into the settings and scroll down to where it says Alias this can be something like Arch desktop for example if I want to make it clear that this is my desktop now when you do this you will have to restart the internal server and when we go back now the name is here if I go to send over on my phone and I refresh now it shows up and because this is a flut application the UI between desktop and mobile is basically identical if I go to settings on my phone and scroll down to Alias if we then change this to I don't know uh phone for example I restart the internal server if we go to send over here it's still going to show the old name but if we do a refresh now it shows up now unlike airdrop there is one one pretty big caveat you do need to make sure both devices are on the same network so if you're out and about it's a little bit inconvenient to use obviously the fact that it's this weird application that most people don't have installed but also the whole network thing so you'd have to set up like a local hotspot and have both devices connect to it but if you're doing this at home for example it works perfectly fine so how do we actually use this well it's pretty straightforward I'm going to send an image from my desktop over to my phone and on the phone it doesn't matter which tab we're on as long as the app is open we can be on receive send or settings as long as this is here on the desktop we need to make sure we go over to the send tab if we click on file this is going to open up whatever file browser makes sense for your specific OS in this case we have the gtk file picker because Linux I'm going to go into my pictures and send this picture of gigachad Richard storman now we don't just have to send a single image if if I click add again it brings up this popup letting me select what I want to send I'm going to send more files if we go into say my MPV screenshots folder and let's just select some random screenshots see all of these ones here if I click open all of those are going to be added so now we are ready to send if I want to send I just click on the device and over on that side it's going to give me a popup it will tell me how many files are being sent and I can choose to accept or decline it in this case I'm going to accept it it's going to start the download and we're all done and on both sides it shows you the files sending and receiving and over on my gallery all seven of these images are here even though one of them simply shouldn't exist and now sending from my phone to my desktop works basically the exact same way with the addition of some extra filters here just to make it a bit easier to deal with the Android file manager so you want to send like specifically an APK you want to send media things like that I'm just going to select file and let let's just add some random file say this thumbnail picture right here there we go I click the arch desktop we get the notification I click accept the image is now sent If instead the other party were to decline the send a notification will be sent to the sender's device the recipient has rejected the request if we close this we can then go and select another device now this may have been obvious by the fact that you have to be on the same network but when you were sending the data when you're trying to find devices that are nearby all of this is being done on your local network there are no thirdparty servers the Internet isn't involved it's all being done locally that doesn't mean the data is sent without any form of encryption though when you are sending this data is encrypted with https with TLS search generated on the Fly does this mean that you should be sending the nuclear launch codes over some random app you found on GitHub no every application can have vulnerabilities but for what regular people are doing sending some funny images back and forth sending a video from one device to another it is perfectly fine especially so if you're only doing it at your home amongst your own devices now I already showed you the reload button but there are these two other buttons as well enter address and send mode I'm going to do the first one from my phone just to make this a little bit easier so enter address let you enter the IP address of the device you want to send to either the final numbers or the full IP address I'm doing this for my phone because I know what the IP address of my desktop is if we enter 55 here now it does the exact same send prompt we saw before this is something that you probably won't ever find yourself actually using but on the off chart you need to send directly to the IP address and the discovery isn't working the way it normally should be that is nice to have there as for the other button that is send mode Now by default it is set to single recipient so you send the file to a single device then we have multiple recipients so you can select multiple devices and it will send the file to all of them last one is share via link this starts up a local server on your device and then on your other device you can then enter this address and go directly to that interface it's going to wait for a response over here we have to go and actually select yes accept it it will then make the connection and then we can go and select the file download it and it works the exact same way as before this is nice if you don't have the application installed on one of your devices but it's still a little bit inconvenient the other option we have here is make a QR code so you can go and scan this QR code on another device they don't need to install any application and will bring them directly to this interface now one thing you may have noticed is this encryption toggle that is not toggled now when we're doing our regular sent if we go into settings go down to advanced settings encryption is enabled but when we're doing share via link it is not enabled and there is a good reason for this let's click on encryption let's grab the link and use a browser that I don't normally use let's go and dump this in here it's going to say your connection is not private which is what normally shows up if you try to use https with a broken TLs sirt but the TLs sirt is perfectly fine if we go back to the application it says exactly what's wrong local send uses a self-signed certificate you need to accept it in the browser now browsers for a very long time rightfully by default do not accept self-signed CS because anybody could sign their own Cs and CS would be basically meaningless you need to have some form of governing body to make sure the SE actually makes sense so in this case what we can do is Click Advanced and click proceed it's still going to say it's not secure but that's just because the browser has no idea what to do with a self-signed sege but once we are here everything is going to work fine if I click on accept now it's going to make the connection we can send the image and we're good to go this isn't a problem within the application because the app knows that it's going to be using a self-signed CT and it knows that the CT is coming from itself so everything is all good it's just a slight inconvenience of the share via link method but using the share via link method is just naturally going to be inconvenient this is just an extra inconvenience on top of the inconvenience now at the start when I was saying I did this between Linux and Android because that's what I had in front of me I absolutely meant that if we go over to the GitHub we have all of the distribution channels we have Windows on wind get scoop chocolatey msix installer a portable zip we have mac on the App Store home RO DMG installer we have Linux flathub a NYX West T Deb app image we have Android play store fdroid APK we have IOS app store we have fireos Amazon there's not many options on these ones but everything else has a ton of different options in this case I'm using the Play Store Android application and I'm using the app image on Linux the reason I'm using the app image and not the flat pack I'll recommend not using the flat pack actually the flat pack has some kind of busted permissions so you can only download and send files from your downloads directory there is a file portal that exists specifically to deal with this problem of letting an application access certain places on your file system but the flat pack doesn't use it so it's basically busted if you want to use the flat pack and it not be super inconvenient basically you have to just delete the file system sandboxing and then it will work properly now this developer is kind of insane because usually a Dev will pick like one or two distribution channels and then anything else just let other people maintain it in this case the main developer with the exception of chocolatey nexxos and the a is listed as one of the maintainers so this guy right here this is the maintainer pretty much everything he is directly involved with now I know what somebody's going to say this is a useless application because I don't know I can do the same thing with netcat I can do this with an SSH connection I can use ass syn for a really hyper lightweight solution and you are absolutely right and there are plenty of other tools that achieve a fairly similar goal for example we have things like share via HTTP QR serve pear drop Linux mints warat all of these great tools as well and I'm sure they have their users however local send works really well and I think it is also a really good application that might be worth using plus I feel like it has a much cleaner interface than a couple of these other applications for example especially compared to share via HTTP like it functions and if you just don't care about any interface whatsoever you just want it to work this will work but like look this is really welld designed and I got to give it props for that and if you care about other tools there is a bunch of other tools listed in the hack a news thread because this is not like a New Concept there is a bunch of things that do this and a bunch of people have tried to do similar things over the years like even KD connect in many ways does much of the same function I just have never had KD connect work properly and local send uh for the time I've been using it has only worked properly so anyway let me know your thoughts in the comment section Down Below have you tried out local send before maybe you use one of these other tools maybe you like to have cables connected to everything and just send it like that I would love to know so if you like the video go like the video and if you really like the video and you want to become one of these amazing people over here check out the patreon subcribes liay Linked In the description down below that's going to be it for me and I think this tool is pretty neat your best you get left if it don't invol Mone I don't if it don't invol money then I [Music] don't