Nothing makes it easier to share files between any Android phone and a Mac

I make a living testing Android phones, but I write about them using a company-supplied MacBook Air. Both platforms are great on their own, but they’re not great at talking to each other. You can now do this on a few Google Pixel and Samsung Galaxy phones AirDrop files directly to Apple devices; The new Warp app doesn’t hope to solve the problem for the rest of us, offering a seamless way to send files and texts between one device and another.

Warp is a combination of Android application And a Browser extensionwhich means it’ll only be useful if you’re using a Chrome-based browser and able to install the extension — but that makes it compatible with macOS, Windows, and Linux, so it’s more universal than AirDrop.

On the phone side, any time you might share a file normally, you’ll see the option to upload it to Warp in the Quick Share menu, and it works with any Android phone — not just anything. You can send photos, videos, or documents, but you can also send texts or links. On your computer, you can send text you’ve selected in your browser directly to your phone’s clipboard, right-click web images to send, or simply upload files from your computer. However, web applications that control the right-click menu will disable it – right-clicking within Google Docs brings up its menu, not the browser menu, so Warp does not appear as an option.

After playing with it this morning, I was surprisingly impressed with Warp. It supports multiple devices, which means you can use this to easily send files between multiple phones or computers, and the receiving device doesn’t even need to be on when you start the transfer.

See, Warp doesn’t actually send files directly between devices, but simply uploads them to a server and sends you a prompt to download to the other device. This makes it a simple and fast option for small files, but it may not be the solution if you’re trying to speed up the transfer of large files like videos. Text and web images load almost instantly; But it takes 10 minutes and counting to upload a 2GB video file, and I still have to download it on the other end.

Nothing says that your files will remain safe and private, because they are actually transferred using Google Drive, which means that there is nothing in itself that seems to not be the person storing or accessing your data. You’ll need to link Warp to your Google account, but don’t worry, this won’t clutter your personal Drive folder — I can’t see any sign of my shared Warp files there. There are no file size limits beyond the amount of Google Drive storage you have left, but that shouldn’t fill your allowed storage capacity — Warp only keeps the 10 most recent files, “so when a new file is uploaded, the oldest one is deleted,” Lewis Hopkins, Nothing’s senior director of global PR, told me.

Warp is now in beta, and is free to use. It’s a more universal solution than Google’s AirDrop integration, or efforts by companies like Opp and Honor to include direct Android-to-Mac file sharing in their operating systems. The biggest compliment 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.

Update, April 15: Added details about how long files are kept.