AirDrop for everyone
Welcome to Advisorator’s Tip of the Week, helping you learn something new from the tech world every Tuesday!
Apple’s AirDrop is a great way to send videos and photos to nearby folks, but not if they’re using Android. Same goes with Android’s Nearby Share feature, which only works with other Android phones.
To share without petty ecosystem boundaries, check out Snapdrop, a free web app for sending files between iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, Chrome OS, and Linux. Snapdrop automatically finds other devices on the same Wi-Fi network, and it uses a local connection that’s both fast and secure. Your files are encrypted and are never sent to any remote servers, and because it’s a web app, no one has to install anything to use it.
This came in handy over the weekend, when I was trying to watch a pair of lengthy videos that my wife had taken on her iPhone. Whereas Google Photos took hours to upload and process the files, Snapdrop delivered them in seconds, with no reduction in video quality. I’ve also been using Snapdrop’s text sharing feature to quickly send links from my phone to my computer.