Nothing makes it easy to share files between any Android phone and a Mac
I test Android phones for a living, but I write about them using a company-provided MacBook Air. Both platforms are great on their own, but they aren’t very good at communicating with each other. On a handful of Google Pixel and Samsung Galaxy phones, you can now AirDrop files directly to Apple machines; Nothing’s new Warp app hopes to solve the problem for the rest of us, by providing a seamless(ish) way to send files and text between one machine and another.
Warp is the combination of an Android app and a browser extension, which means it’ll only be useful if you’re using a Chrome-based browser capable of installing the extension – but that makes it compatible with macOS, Windows, and Linux, so it’s more universal than AirDrop.
On the phone side, whenever you normally share a file, you’ll see the option to upload it to Warp in the Quick Share menu, and it works with any Android phone, not just Nothing. You can send images, videos or documents, but also text or links. On the PC side, you can send text you’ve highlighted in your browser directly to the phone’s clipboard, right-click web images to send, or simply upload files from your computer. Web apps that take control of your context menu will break it, however: right-clicking in Google Docs brings up its own menu, not the browser’s, so Warp doesn’t appear as an option.
After playing with it this morning, I’m surprisingly impressed with Warp. It supports multiple devices, which means you can use it to easily send files between multiple phones or PCs and the receiving device doesn’t even need to be turned on when you initiate the transfer.
You see, Warp doesn’t send files directly between devices, but simply uploads them to a server and sends you a download prompt on the other device. This makes it a quick and easy option for small files, but probably not the solution if you’re trying to speed up the transfer of larger files like videos. Web text and images download almost instantly; but it took ten minutes to download a 2GB video file, and I’ll still have to download it on the other end.
Nothing says that your files will remain secure and private, as they are actually transferred using Google Drive, meaning that Nothing itself is apparently not the one storing or accessing your data. You’ll need to link Warp to your Google account, but don’t worry, it won’t mess up your personal Drive folder – I don’t see any sign of my shared Warp files there. I asked Nothing if Warp downloads would count towards your Google storage and how to delete them when needed if so, but didn’t have an answer at the time of publishing.
Warp is now available in beta and is free to use. This is a more universal solution than Google’s AirDrop integration or Oppo and Honor’s efforts to include direct Android to Mac file sharing in their operating systems. The biggest praise I can give Warp is that I’ll keep it installed and I think I’ll get a lot of use out of it – but I’m still looking for a better way to share larger files directly between my devices.
