NearDrop is a partial implementation of Google's Nearby Share for macOS.
Protocol documentation is available separately.
The app lives in your menu bar and saves files to your downloads folder. It's that simple, really.
- Receive only. For now. I haven't yet figured out how to make Android turn on the MDNS service and/or show the "a device nearby is sharing" notification.
- Wi-Fi LAN only. Your Android device and your Mac need to be on the same network for this app to work. Google's implementation supports multiple mediums, including Wi-Fi Direct, Wi-Fi hotspot, Bluetooth, some kind of 5G peer-to-peer connection, and even a WebRTC-based protocol that goes over the internet through Google servers. Wi-Fi direct isn't supported on macOS (Apple has their own, incompatible, AWDL thing, used in AirDrop). Bluetooth needs further reverse engineering.
Download the latest build from the releases section, unzip, move to your applications folder. Do the usual Gatekeeper thing to run an Apple-untrusted app for the first time. If you want the app to start on boot, add it manually to login objects in System Preferences.
Because I don't want to pay Apple $99 a year for the privilege of developing macOS apps and oppose their idea of security.
Because I don't want to pay Apple $99 a year for the privilege of developing macOS apps. I also don't want to have to go through the review process.
While I am an Android developer, and I have looked into this, this is nigh-impossible. AirDrop uses AWDL, Apple's own proprietary take on peer-to-peer Wi-Fi. This works on top of 802.11 itself, the low-level Wi-Fi protocol, and thus can not be implemented without messing around with the Wi-Fi adapter drivers and raw packets and all that. It might be possible on Android, but it would at the very least require root and possibly a custom kernel. There is an open-source implementation of AWDL and AirDrop for Linux.