nearby

Sharing
Connections
~~Presence~~ ( Build fails for some reason. Haven't had time to investigate. Maybe something minor. Check the validate.yaml for build steps and see why its faiing )

Linux specific implementation and compatibility shims are provided for building Sharing and Connections. Nearby presence may or may not build. I haven't tested it.

Why

This repo could've been a PR on the official repo. All I've done is implement the platform abstraction layer google has provided for a linux specific environment. It's not like I haven't made a PR towards the official repo. I got tired of begging the official nearby maintainers for a PR review. So here we are.

Moreover, all I've wanted was seamless file sharing between my android devices and my linux workstation + laptop. With this repo and the example application provided here, it accomplishes that goal perfectly. This repo wasn't created out of any altruistic goals or out of the goodness of my heart. I had a problem. I solved it. Simple as that.

How

How to use

Proper documentation is coming I swear. University's getting pretty hectic so docs is on the backburner. The wiki has some more information but it's nowhere near a proper documentation. It has some good brief overviews and where generally everything is located if you're thinking about contributing.

If you want any clarification on anything, feel free to open an issue. I'll get back to you ASAP.

As a consolation prize, I've indexed this project using Deepwiki. You might have strong feeling about AI use. But I feel like documenting very large codebases is a perfect usecase for such models. (They are called Large Language Models for a reason )

How to install

This repo provides prebuilt binaries of the Quick Share application. The only officially supported distro is Fedora 43 for now. The newest ubuntu images should work fine although that needs to be tested. I want to support more distros so if you encounter issues installing on your distro, please let me know.

Note

Any distros not shipping support for sdbus-c++ v2 will NOT be compatible as of right now. The project depends on it as a shared library as of right now. I'm working on bundling it with the compiled binary

Prerequisites

sdbus-cpp >= 2.0
bluez >= 5.85

To install the prerequisites, run this command

sudo dnf install -y \
  bluez bluez-libs bluez-libs-devel \
  sdbus-cpp sdbus-cpp-devel

To install the Quick Share application,

Go to releases
Download the latest nearby-file-share-linux-*.tar.gz
mkdir -p nearby && tar -xf nearby-file-share-linux-*.tar.gz -C nearby
cd nearby
chmod +x install_nearby_file_share.sh
./install_nearby_file_share.sh

To install the actual library and headers,

Currently there are no prebuilt shared library or headers. You'll have to build them yourself

How to build

Check the wiki

How to contribute

Check the wiki

TODO

ship a prebuilt sdbus 2
Investigate why bluetooth connection requests pairing ( both l2cap socket and bluetooth profile should be unauthenticated )
When transferring (android to linux) over bluetooth classic, android shows 100% transferred ( but still Sending... ) while linux lags behind. Some kind of bottleneck or android bug?
Tests for basically everything.
Cleanup of implementation/linux. Currently all the linux specific implementation files are in the same directory. Even though thats how the other platforms have their stuff structured, I personally hate the visual bloat.
Documentation basically everything ( honestly this would be a massive project in itself )
Resolving random crashes of quick share application
Support for fast initiation
When receiving, if file already exists, does not overwrite currently. Decide what to do then

Apologies

I may have done things in incredibly stupid and overcomplicated ways. It doesn't certainly help that this was the way I decided to learn C++. Blessed be my naive soul. I also do not have much experience working with such enormous codebases.

If you see any such stupidities, feel free to berate me in the most shameless of manners in an issue. I look forward to learning how to do it the proper way and to improve my atrocious code quality.

Special thanks

https://github.com/proatgram and https://github.com/vibhavp

they were the original authors of the linux platform support PR that I have based much of this codebase upon. I am standing on the shoulders of giants

README.md

Google Nearby Sharing & Connections for Linux (Unofficial)

Demo

What

Why

How