I test Android phones for a living, but I write about them using a company-supplied MacBook Air. Both platforms are great in their own right, but they’re not so great at talking to one another. 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, offering a seamless(ish) way to send files and text between one machine and the other.
Warp is the combination of an Android app and a browser extension, which means it’ll only be helpful if you use a Chrome-based browser capable of installing the extension — but that does make it compatible with macOS, Windows, and Linux, so it’s more universal than AirDrop.
On the phone side, any time you might 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’s. You can send images, videos, or documents, but also text or links. On the PC end, 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 right-click menu will break it though — right-clicking within Google Docs shows its own menu, not the browser’s, so Warp doesn’t appear as an option.
After playing around with it this morning, I’m surprisingly impressed with Warp. It supports multiple devices, which means you can use this to easily send files between multiple phones or PCs, and the receiving device doesn’t even have to be on when you initiate the transfer.
See, Warp isn’t actually sending files directly between devices, but simply uploading them to a server and sending you a download prompt on the other device. That makes it a simple, quick option for small files, but probably not the fix if you’re trying to speed up transferring larger files like videos. Text and web images upload almost instantly; but it’s taken 10 minutes and counting for it to upload a 2GB video file, and I’ll still have to download it on the other end.
Nothing says your files will remain secure and private, because they’re actually being transferred using Google Drive, meaning Nothing itself apparently isn’t the one storing or accessing your data. You will need to link Warp to your Google account, but don’t worry, this won’t make a mess of your personal Drive folder — I can’t see any sign of my shared Warp files in there. Lewis Hopkins, Nothing’s senior global PR manager, told me that there are no file size limits beyond the amount of Google Drive storage you have left, but this shouldn’t fill up your storage allowance — Warp only keeps the latest 10 files, “so when a new one is uploaded, the oldest one gets deleted.”
Warp is out now in beta, and free to use. It’s a more universal solution than Google’s AirDrop integration, or efforts from the likes of Oppo and Honor to include direct Android-to-Mac file-sharing in their OSes. The highest praise I can give Warp is that I’m going to keep it installed, and suspect I’ll get plenty of use out of it — but I’m still on the hunt for a better way to share bigger files directly between my devices.
Update, April 15th: Added details on how long files are retained.
