Yes! One should be able to take advantage of the speed of a local transfer. One doesn't always have access to a blazingly fast Internet connection and file-transfer service through which to transfer data. One should be able to transfer data between neighboring devices even when no Internet connections are available.

This is the only thing that Bluetooth consistently works for. I can send files between my laptop and my feature phone, and other people's laptops, and other people's phones… It's more reliable than email.

Bluetooth doesn't consistently work for connecting I/O devices to my computer, though. Only peer-to-peer file transfer.

Bluetooth almost got me 100% there as well! Until I discovered that Apple devices don't support sending/receiving files via Bluetooth. But at least it covers about 80% of the devices I own and doesn't rely on external services like most other options people wrote about as a reply.

Macbooks do; there's an app called Bluetooth File Exchange. Most people I know with iPhones have macOS laptops, too, so I can send to that.

Ah, sadly the 20% in the amount I wrote about above is one iPhone that won't play nice with the Bluetooth coverage I have at home with other devices :/

KDE Connect works for me. Granted, I've only tried it between an android phone and a Linux laptop, but I've heard from others it works well on other OSes and phones too:

https://kdeconnect.kde.org/download.html

For me transmitting any file over the network between my android(Termux) and my laptop(Fedora) is awful. It starts with a quite fast transmission (Like 60 Mbps), but always drops to just a few kbps after a few hundred megabytes. Netcat does this, python HTTP-Server, FTP, scp, everything fails.

... including, I presume, KDE Connect?

I feel your pain, I tried tons of other solutions before discovering KDE Connect. It works well for my laptop/phone combination, but I given how horrible each other solution was before it I'm not surprised if it doesn't work for others.

edit: I wonder if perhaps some part of your phone hardware overheats after N megabytes because it's not built for constant file transfer, or constant file transfer using these protocols at least? What if you try throttling it on purpose?

Yeah, KDE Connect did the same.

I think it is the fault of the network stack of one those two devices, otherwise I can't explain that. Maybe that the devices receive/send data faster than they are able to process. (Is this even possible?)

But I could be awfully wrong

Regarding your edit: That's a good idea, but I never attempted that. I can't test that, because I'm in a Wifi where no device is allowed to talk to another :(

Smells like a TCP in TCP problem.

Or even just a small piece of text, i.e. a link. I have a samba share on one system for files, but that is certainly not "regardless of operating system", as it's a pain to do that with a phone.

So a discord server with just me in it is ... also gives you handy direct links for files up to 8mb.

$ cd /directory/with/files/you/want/to/share

$ python3 -m http.server 1337

Then just connect to the IP and Port of the machine hosting the python http server and transfer away.

Aside from Bluetooth I'm not sure how you'd do this without using a LAN or WAN.

I do this but I always get a little nervous about it being accessible to any process anywhere on that network. If the system firewall supports it, I think it would be interesting to make the http connection, and then restrict that port to existing connections only. Once you are confident only your intended client has connected, put the files in the directory.

Love this reply, giving me “Why Dropbox just rsync vibes” :)

I think croc is a superior solution here. Encrypted transfer. Automatic local peer detection. Human speakable commands. Turns off when you’re done. No firewall fiddling (and I fiddling)

Pythons web server is single threaded I believe so any simultaneously connections break.

https://github.com/schollz/croc

For PC-to-PC syncing of folders, I have found https://syncthing.net/ to work well.

Taildrop (https://tailscale.com/kb/1106/taildrop/) mostly filled this for me, although this is just for the same Tailnet. AirDrop is also pretty slick. Otherwise I chuck it onto my NAS.

Of course all of these solutions have some serious pre-requisites...

I just use https://file.pizza/ works on any OS with a web browser and the file is transferred p2p so its very fast over local networks. And the Url is easy to remember.

Looks great and P2P is of course required for this, but sadly it'd only work when online :/

Would be great with local network discovery of p2p peers but seemingly browsers are not really interested in enabling that...

KDE Connect is a godsend for this. Surprisingly its on windows too

Perhaps the 3DS was on to something with those tiny IR sensors on the front.

IR transfers worked great on Palm Pilots (and their successors) and many models of graphing calculators.

`python -m http.server` if they are in the same network? Sure, you have no authentication/security, but for quick+dirty it works fine

AFAIK, python doesn't ship by default on any operating system anymore (used to on macOS). Otherwise yeah, it's a good contender. You'd still need to pass the URL somehow to the other machine :)

I think it does on several major Linux distros .

i know you probably know this & you said OS agnostic - but apple really nailed this between macs and iphones. The shared clipboard feels like magic, and airdrop works great too.

AirDrop? Always works flawlessly in my experience.

It sure does, but they said "regardless of operating system." Outside of the apple-verse it still sucks.

Oh I see. I took it to mean there are no platforms where this works, but they make there is no scheme that works across all platforms? The problem with the latter form of the question is there will always be some garbage platform that doesn’t participate.

I'm pretty pissed off that infrared got phased out as a technology. Doubly so that this was replaced by bluetooth.

Yes it was slow, but it worked straightforwardly and reliably, every, single, time.