Sharing near seems to me, and I have said so on previous occasions, The definitive solution to the problem from Google which, although it may seem insignificant, has actually meant an immeasurable loss of time over the years, something that we can verify if we spend a few minutes thinking about the accumulated time we devoted to alternative systems for transferring files of all kinds between smartphone and PC. Copy to hard drive online, send by e-mail… You know what I’m talking about and you’ve probably suffered from it too.

at this point Apple has had the upper hand for years with AirDrop, the only drawback of which is that of course it only works between devices / operating systems of those from Cupertino. That’s why I’m surprised that it took Google so long (AirDrop is around ten years old) to come up with a similar solution, and given the existing harmony between Android and Windows, that they didn’t think about transferring files between the two platforms.

In September last year we have seen the first step in this direction with the release of Nearby Sharing, which allowed file transfers between Android and ChromeOS. Windows was left out of the equation, but good news was close at hand, as a few months later Google announced that the feature had been extended to Windows 10 and Windows 11 as well, at which point the open beta began. And about a month later, still in beta, its global deployment was confirmed.

Since then, this feature has been available to all users who wanted to try it, but Only today was the official launch of Nearby Sharing from Google, as we can read on his blog. And it’s that although it was public and open, until now it was available as part of a testing program. With the official launch, will this change translate into something more than a simple change of states, say administrative?

The good news is, yes, and now Nearby sharing will show an estimate of the remaining time to complete the file transfer, which may seem unnecessary if we are talking about copying several photos (since the process will be practically instantaneous), but it may take much longer if what we want to transfer is a video or another type of large file. In these cases, it is undoubtedly an advantage to have an updated estimate.

Also for transferring images, which according to Google’s post is the type of file that Nearby Sharing is used for the most, it will now show a preview of what we are copying between devices. This gets interesting if we are talking about image transfers between different users’ devices, because this way we can see what images were sent to us when the listing was created.