LocalSend — An open-source cross-platform alternative to AirDrop

I emailed and told Paul about LocalSend back in early July after listening to an older Windows Weekly episode and hearing Paul and Leo talking about emailing yourself stuff on Windows or from your PC to your phone or vice versa. I’m not sure if Paul saw that email, but LocalSend just had another update and I thought I would let others know about it here.

I’ve used AlternativeTo.net for years. I use it all the time. A number of months ago, I started poking around to see if there was any cross-platform alternative to AirDrop. This has bugged me for years and I was hoping there was some solution out there, hopefully even an open-source one. That is how I stumbled across LocalSend in January or February of this year. I wish I had known about it a long time ago.

It isn’t perfect, but it does work overall quite well and is relatively simple. The only issue I have seen is maybe I open the client on my PC or on my phone and the client I want to send from (i.e. sending client) might not “see” the receiving client available. Usually, I’ll just close the sending client and re-launch it and it sees the receiving client fine. Perhaps just closing the receiving client and re-launching that will also work. But, other than the sending client perhaps not seeing the receiving client at first, LocalSend as a system has worked quite well for text and files of all sorts and sizes.

I should add that I use a custom port for all of my devices along with encryption. The custom port could perhaps impact the sending/receiving devices not always at first seeing each other. I have not played around with the port (default vs. custom) to see if that has any impact on the slight problem I see at times.

https://localsend.org

https://github.com/localsend/localsend