Better than Quick Share and AirDrop

Quick Share It’s a useful but flawed feature. Quickly sharing files between your Android, Windows, and even iOS devices is incredibly convenient. Unfortunately, it is not the most reliable tool in the world. It is often slow to detect devices and transfer files, and is prone to disconnections. Fortunately, there is a much better tool that has made my life even easier and it is free.

As frustrating as it is to use, I have resigned myself to using it. No alternative I’ve tried has been better as I always have the same problems or am tied to a subscription model. Then a few weeks ago I was listening to the Waveform podcast and an app called Blip was mentioned. After hearing how this product reliably handles the massive files the MKBHD team works with, I decided to try it out for myself and couldn’t be happier with it.

Using Blip is easy. It is available on Android, Mac, Windows and iOS, and will soon be compatible with Linux. Once you’ve downloaded it to all your devices, sharing your files is easy. In Windows, you can right-click any file or folder and look for an option to click on the menu. Both Android and iOS show it in the sharing menu, as do Quick Share and AirDrop. If you’re sharing to one of your devices, you don’t need to open the app or approve the transfer on the destination device. If you log into the app and turn it on, the transfer will happen instantly.

I’m not kidding when I say it’s instant. Transfer speed is limited by your network, not the service itself. When I went on vacation last week, I used Blip to transfer 12GB of Sims 4 mods and saves from my desktop to my laptop over Wi-Fi, and it hit 1.5Gbps. You also don’t have to be on the same network. Transfers can be sent over the Internet, and several times while on vacation I saved the photos to my laptop to edit when I returned.

Telling things to other people is also easy. My wife signed up after I used it for a few days and adding her to my app was as simple as searching for her email address.

Here lies another advantage that Blip has over Quick Share or AirDrop. With those tools, I would have to choose the specific device my wife wants to receive the files on. With Blip, I simply send it and the request appears on every device you have, with the files sent to whatever device you use to accept the request. The amount of cat photos being exchanged between our devices is, frankly, worrying. Cat tax below.

Are there any disadvantages? Not precisely. Obviously, you need to convince others to download the app, but that goes for anything that’s not on your device. If you can get past that hurdle, or if you just need to transfer files to yourself, then Blip bypasses everything else.

There is a paid version of the service, but I doubt you need it. The advantages of Blip Business are priority speed during peak hours and direct customer support. Priority speeds only matter if you’re transferring to a device on a different network, so the free version is likely all you need.

I’ve been using Blip for a month and have used it almost every day. Unlike Quick Share, which often fails to send a file or does so so slowly that a screenshot takes half an hour, Blip has been fast and reliable throughout. It’s made it onto the list of apps I install on every new device and I can’t recommend it enough.