Airdrop alternatives for Apple Devices

It’s no wonder we are looking for Airdrop alternatives for Apple devices because sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. I usually find it works quite well when I want to go from Mac to Mac. AirDrop usually works pretty good if I want to go from my iPad to my iPhone. Where you are more likely to have difficulty is if you want to send files from Mac to iPad. It often seems so his and miss that you’ll be thinking, is airdrop not working on Mac today. You are on the same network and you have opened up a share sheet in the photos app on your iPhone. AirDrop is waiting in your Mac Finder window so everything is in place and AirDrop is not showing up. There are huge conversations on the Apple support site about how to use Airdrop between Mac and iPad. Users are wondering how to transfer files from Mac to iPad or iPhone. It really shouldn’t be that difficult! I have just followed the instructions on the Apple support site and still I can’t see my iPhone or my iPad available on the Mac. If I want to send a file from iPhone to iPad then no problem. I suspect the difficulty comes down to the fact that AirDrop is not just using Wi-Fi but also is using Bluetooth. The iMac I’m using is nearly 5 years old, and still works great, but it doesn’t have the latest version of Bluetooth. What we need are Airdrop alternatives for Apple devices. Don’t even consider getting a Bluetooth LE dongle to get the latest Bluetooth on your Mac because that’s not going to work. There are other options that will allow us to send files wirelessly in between our Macs, iPads and iPhones. There are also other ways to move information in between the Mac and iOS devices.

What to do if you can’t Airdrop from iPad to Mac

So what are AirDrop alternatives for Apple devices are there? If you want to send a small piece of text in between Apple devices then nasal application is Copied. You install the two applications, one for the Mac and the other on your iOS devices and they talk to each other. It’s release to use, all you have to do is to select whatever it is you want to move and copy it to the clipboard. To test it I just copied an image of a webpage to the clipboard and within seconds it was available in the copied application on my iPhone. I thought I’d be able to use the special Copied keyboard and paste into whatever application would take images. The way it worked was to open the Copied application on the iPhone and to select the image and then to use a share extension to save it to the Photos application. So it did work, although not quite as I expected it would. When I was trying to copy a picture of Safari on the iPhone it didn’t go into the application Copied. I then tried the same trick in Twitterific and the image found its way to Copied. I then went to the Mac and to the Copied icon in the menu bar at the top of the screen. I did have to press the synchronisation button, but the image did appear in the list of clippings. So I can report success in my first look for airdrop alternatives. Moving snippets of text and pictures is one thing and useful because we have to do from time to time but it’s not going to be the best of the airdrop alternatives for Apple devices.

Bit Torrent Sync app is at the top list of the airdrop alternatives for Apple devices

When it comes to airdrop alternatives for Apple devices Bit Torrent Sync is the best of the best. What you get is fast, simple and secure file synchronisation and not just between Macs and iOS devices, but also for Android, Windows and Linux. When the files are moving between devices it doesn’t send things off to the Internet to bring them back again on the other device. What it does is to find the shortest path between the computer devices and sends direct. Nothing has to go to the cloud if you want to transfer a file from Mac to iPad or from iPhone to Android device. Obviously it’s going to be much quicker when you’re not uploading to third-party service. Using Bit torrent sync just move the files and it doesn’t matter if they are big files. You can even sync files containing gigabytes or even terabytes of data.

Normally when we are considering moving files with airdrop when talking about just one file or a couple of files. We get the file to where it got to go to and use it and that’s the job done. With Bit Torrent Sync you get intelligent synchronisation. This means incremental updates which is useful when you edit an existing file. The sync application knows it needs only to update the parts that have changed in the file rather than the entire file. The ability to do this also increases the speed of the synchronisation of files.

With this synchronisation system you also get secure links for sharing. Set an expiration time for the link you create and this could be just one day or one week. If somebody tries to use the link after it has expired it will not work. The way this synchronisation application works is that you synchronise a folder. You create the folder for synchronisation within the application and specify if you wanted to be Read Only or Read And Write in the permissions. This is also where you set the exploration of the link and how often the link can be used. The invitation to synchronise with this folder you send by email or you could copy it into the clipboard to send to the recipient. Easy way to do this with setting things up on the iPhone or iPad is to use the QR code. In the application there is a plus symbol in the top right-hand corner, tap on this. Here is where you create a folder, enter a key or scan a QR code. Then all you have to do is to point the camera of your iPhone or iPad at the QR code and hey presto you are connected. You will never again have to worry about things like – Where do you drop files go? How to turn on a drop on Mac? AirDrop not showing up or any of the other problems you find with a drop between Mac and iPad or iPhone. For personal use these applications are free. You can if you want to spend €35 and get some pro features. For the small amount of moving files between Mac and iOS I do, I haven’t found the need to go pro yet. I can honestly say it is a much better solution than using Apple Airdrop. I highly recommend using this and you can stop looking for AirDrop alternatives for Apple devices.

Using applications with iCloud or Dropbox

There are some applications I use such as Ulysses, Byword, Photos, apps such as Keynote and Pages and you don’t have to think about moving files. Once you have your background synchronisation methods set up, such as using iCloud with Ulysses, that’s it, you have all of your files wherever you are working on them on your devices. Same sort of thing if you are using something like Google Docs. The documents are read from the cloud and always available or they synchronise through to your Apple devices. You don’t have to worry about Airdrop alternatives for Apple Devices