Local file transfers made easy, leveraging Nearby Share
Nearby Share is great. It’s basically the Android equivalent of AirDrop we wanted for so long, and allows for rapidly sending files between devices. More recently, Nearby Share was added to Chromebooks, so not only could users exchange files between phones now, but also across a wider range of laptops and tablets. Today we’re learning about what sounds like the next evolution there — a useful improvement called Self Share, which could come in handy for those of you with a lot of devices in your household.
Formally designated “Nearby Sharing Self Share” (that’s a mouthful), the feature was first reported on by ChromeStory and right now it’s still in development — we’ve seen a mention on the Chromium Gerrit but it’s not yet available in any live Chrome OS build.
Operation sounds pretty self-explanatory — when sharing a file, you’ll also see a “Send to your devices” option that will allow you to transfer files to other phones/tablets/laptops you own. The ability to share files wirelessly from your computer to your phone is hardly a new, groundbreaking concept, but we’re always interested in ways to make frequent tasks easier.
If you want to try it out, be on the lookout for a new experimental flag coming to a Canary build. It’s going to be at least a few months before we might hope to see it hit stable, so if you don’t like messing around with in-testing software, it’s going to be a while before you can try it out for yourself.
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