How to Use Nearby Share to Share Files Between Android and Windows

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Google announced its plans to bring Nearby Share—its AirDrop competitor—to Windows at CES 2022. It’s been a year since, and the company has released the Nearby Share app, as promised, on Windows.

Nearby Share allows Android and Windows alike to share photos, videos, documents, files, and links between both platforms quickly and easily. As of writing this, it’s in beta and supports Windows 10 and 11.

If you frequently share files or links between an Android phone and a Windows PC, this is good news for you! Follow along, and we’ll show you how to use Nearby Share to share files between Android and Windows.

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Nearby Share is currently available in beta on Windows, so you might experience some issues using it. In our time, though we didn’t encounter any strange issues with the app, it did crash a couple of times.

But if you don’t mind this, here’s how to get Nearby Share on your Windows PC:

Once you’ve installed the Nearby Share app on your computer, you need to set it up before you can use it to transfer or receive files from an Android phone.

Follow these steps to do this:

Now that you’ve got Nearby Share set up on your Windows 10/11 PC, you can start sharing files with an Android phone. But before that, here are a few key things you need to know:

If you want to share a file or link on your Android phone to a Windows PC, first, make sure your desktop is visible on the network. Head over to Nearby Share’s Settings page on your PC and choose Everyone or Contacts. After this, follow these steps:

Depending on the size of the file and the medium of transfer, your file will now be transferred to the Windows PC. It’ll be downloaded automatically and saved to the Downloads folder on your computer.

However, if you want, you can change it from the settings. Simply click the settings icon on the Nearby Share app, tap the Change button on the Save received files to option, and pick the directory where you want to save files going forward. Finally, hit Change to save the preferences.

Much like sharing files from an Android phone, transferring files from your Windows PC to an Android phone is also easy with Nearby Share.

First, enable Nearby Share on your Android phone. A quick way to do this is to bring up the Quick Settings panel, tap on the Nearby Share tile, and toggle on the Device visibility option. After this, set the visibility to Everyone or Contacts based on whether you’re using Nearby Share on your desktop, signed in, or signed out.

Now, follow these steps to transfer files from your Windows PC to your Android phone:

Once the file(s) are downloaded, you can find them under the Downloads directory on your phone.

By releasing the Nearby Share app on Windows, Google has finally made transferring files between Android devices and Windows desktops/laptops quick and simple. Not only that, but it has also put an end to users’ long-running search for an Android-Windows file-sharing platform.

Google’s Nearby Share is free, fast, reliable, and easy to use. And we must admit that, after all these years of its existence, it’s finally reached a stage where it’s comparable to Apple’s AirDrop.

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