// the find
spieglt/FlyingCarpet
Cross-platform AirDrop. File transfer between Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, and Windows over ad hoc WiFi. No network infrastructure required, just two devices with WiFi chips (and optionally Bluetooth) in close range.
Flying Carpet is a local file transfer tool that creates an ad hoc WiFi hotspot between two devices — no router, no internet, no cloud. It covers Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, and Windows. The target user is someone who regularly moves files between mixed-OS devices and finds USB drives or cloud uploads annoying.
The Tauri-based desktop app is genuinely lightweight — no Electron bloat, small binary footprint across all three desktop platforms. The Bluetooth LE negotiation added in v9 is a nice UX improvement: devices can find each other's IP and password without manual entry or QR scanning. The core transfer logic lives in a shared Rust crate, so the platform-specific code is mostly network and Bluetooth plumbing rather than duplicated business logic. Available on F-Droid, which matters to the privacy-conscious crowd this tool will attract.
Dropping your WiFi internet connection during a transfer (on Linux and macOS) is a real problem that the author acknowledges but hasn't solved — this alone makes it unusable in practice for anyone on a call or with background sync running. The cryptography section of the README is a yellow flag: SHA-256 for key derivation instead of a proper KDF, with the justification that WPA2 protects the channel anyway; that's fine if you trust the reasoning, but it reads like a shortcut that wasn't fully revisited. The iOS/macOS Swift codebase is closed-source, which means the open-source story is incomplete and community fixes are blocked on the maintainer. Linux support is explicitly Debian-biased and the Fedora issues are unresolved.