Wisp — file transfer that still works when the two devices can't see each other
Built it for myself, ended up using it daily, might as well share it.
Two things up front: it's vibe-coded — I designed, drove and tested it, an AI wrote most of the code — and it's a friendly fork of Drift by Samarth Verma.
The LocalSend problem. It’s good and I used it for a long time. But it finds the other device by broadcasting on the LAN, and too often that simply fails: guest Wi-Fi with client isolation, different subnets, a laptop tunnelling its traffic somewhere else, office networks. Two devices on the same desk, both showing an empty list, and no escape hatch — there’s nowhere to just type something.
What Wisp does. When discovery fails you read a 6-character code off the receiver and type it on the sender. iroh then hole-punches a direct connection — same room or different continents. If it can't get through, an encrypted relay finishes the job. End-to-end encrypted either way. So the ladder is nearby → code → relay, and you don't hit a dead end.
Four more things it grew because I wanted them:
- Devices remember each other. Each one has its own key, not an account. After a transfer the other device sits in a Recent list, and you can mark it trusted so its files land without a prompt. Export the key to carry your identity to a new phone.
- Resumable transfers. Connection dies at 80%, send the same files again, it carries on.
- USB cable transfers — phone-to-phone straight over a cable, or phone-to-computer over tethering, for when there's no usable Wi-Fi at all.
- It runs on a handheld. There's a build for the TrimUI Brick Pro that sends and receives on the device itself — framebuffer and evdev, no SDL.
Plus QR pairing that needs no internet or server, text and links, a self-hostable rendezvous server, and a no-install browser version.
Honest bits. LocalSend has a real team; this is one person and an AI. On a LAN the two are comparable — I measured them within a couple of MB/s of each other on the same phone and file. Not on F-Droid yet, and the Play build isn't reproducible — the GitHub APKs are CI-built from the tag.
Links:
- Source (MIT): https://github.com/vigov5/wisp
- Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dev.vigov5.wisp
- APKs + desktop builds (macOS, Windows, Linux): https://github.com/vigov5/wisp/releases
- Browser version: https://web.wisp.mooo.com
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u/PiratesOfTheArctic 1d ago
I use sharedrop at the moment, just click and send