Nothing promised AirDrop support, but gave us Nothing Warp instead

Nothing has had a successful year so far, with its new Nothing Phone 4a Pro selling better than the company anticipated. Carrying over the momentum, today, Nothing has launched a new app, Nothing Warp, that allows Android users to transfer files between their Android phone and their Windows desktop or MacBook.

Nothing Warp started off as an internal tool for file transfers, but the company has now released it to the public. It aims to allow users to seamlessly send files, links, copied text, and images between devices. You’ll need two apps — Nothing Warp on your Android phone or tablet, and the Nothing Warp browser extension for Google Chrome on macOS, Windows, and Linux. You’ll also need to sign into devices on both sides using the same Google account.

Once set up, the Nothing Warp app integrates directly into the Android share menu. The app also uses Google Drive (associated with your signed-in Google account) to transfer the files and data, so the app itself does not store or access your data.

We tried Nothing Warp to transfer images and PDFs from a Nothing Phone 4a to a MacBook Air, and it was a surprisingly seamless experience. You need to share the file you need transferred to Nothing Warp, which then uploads it to Google Drive, and the file appears in your Nothing Warp Chrome extension. It also works the same the other way around.

For what it claims to do, it does it well and surprisingly quickly, though it likely also depends on your internet connection and the size of your files.

One can argue that if you’re technically just uploading files to Google Drive, you could do so yourself without extra apps as middlemen, and they’d be right — you can do all of this yourself without extra apps and without giving those extra apps permissions over your data.

Nothing Warp does solve some edge cases, such as when Drive zips multiple files for download, which can be annoying if you have only a couple of images you’d rather download individually (Nothing Warp couldn’t multi-download in our limited testing).

If you’re worried about clogging your Google Drive with unnecessary files that you just needed to transfer and not store or back up, fret not, as we could not locate any transferred files or their residues in Google Drive. Nothing Warp deletes the files from your Drive when the transfer is complete.

The Nothing Warp browser extension requires extensive permissions, so privacy-conscious users might still prefer other solutions.

Nothing Warp works across Android phones, not just Android phones, so that’s a plus. However, for transferring files between Android and Windows, you can use Google Quick Share. Nothing promised that AirDrop-compatible Quick Share support would be coming soon to Nothing phones, allowing them to transfer files with macOS and iPhones, but that still hasn’t happened months after the promise. While Nothing Warp does what it says it can, other file transfer solutions do the job a little better.