pyquickshare 0.1.0

An asynchronous Python implementation of the Android Quick Share (Nearby Share) protocol

pyquickshare

An asynchronous Python implementation of the Android Quick Share (Nearby Share) protocol

System requirements

pyquickshare has following expectations from the system:

• some mDNS implementation (avahi, systemd-resolved, etc.)
• Bluetooth stack using BlueZ reachable via D-Bus

As these are de-facto standards on Linux, pyquickshare should work on most Linux distributions.

Firewalls

As Quick Share uses a direct connection between devices, it is necessary to allow incoming connections on the advertised port. firewalld is supported out of the box (but not required).

pyquickshare temporarily reconfigures firewalld (if available) to accept an incoming connection on it's advertised port. This is done by adding a temporary rule to the currently "active" zone. This rule is automatically removed by firewalld after 5 minutes.

Communication with firewalld is done over D-Bus, polkit may prompt for authentication.

Installation

pip install git+https://github.com/teaishealthy/pyquickshare

Features

Receive is fully implemented, namely WiFi credentials, files, and text. Sending only supports files, but support for sending text and WiFi credentials is planned.

Transfer

Only LAN/Wifi is supported at the moment, but Bluetooth is planned.

Discovery

pyquickshare uses mDNS to discover other devices on the local network. BLE is only used to trigger advertisment at the moment.

Usage

example.py is a basic example of how to use pyquickshare. It provides a command line interface to send and receive files using Quick Share:

uv run example.py receive

uv run example.py send <file>

Notes and Acknowledgements

• The code in pyquickshare/protos is generated from protobuf sources licensed under Apache 2.0. As a derivative work, these generated files remain under the original Apache 2.0 license. A copy of the original license can be found in the pyquickshare/protos directory.

• This project would not have been possible without the amazing reverse engineering work done by grishka on the Quick Share protocol. Check out NearDrop, a similar project for Mac OS.

• WiFi-Direct: While according to Google's Nearby documentation and the protobuf fields WiFi-Direct is supposed to be an available medium, it seems that Quick Share does not use it. It more likely uses WiFi-Aware which isn't widely supported outside of Android devices.