Anyone who has bought a phone in a Bangladeshi market knows the ritual: the shopkeeper opens SHAREit, pairs it with your old phone, and pushes your photos across in minutes without a byte of mobile data. WhatsApp wants that job. According to WABetaInfo, which reads the app’s test builds, WhatsApp is developing offline file sharing — photos, videos, music and documents sent to a nearby WhatsApp user over a local connection, with no internet on either phone.
How it works
The two phones must be close together, as with Bluetooth or the local Wi-Fi link that SHAREit and Xender use. WhatsApp wraps the transfer in its usual end-to-end encryption, so an offline file is as private as an online message. To make the connection the app needs permission to access the phone’s files, photo gallery and location — the location permission is what Android requires for discovering nearby devices, not for tracking — and the sharing mode can be switched off once the transfer is done. The feature is in testing with beta users; WhatsApp has made no announcement and given no date, but its recent pattern suggests a public release within a few months.
Who it is for
Not, primarily, users in Berlin or Boston, where unlimited data makes the problem invisible. Offline sharing matters where data is metered and often gone by the end of the month, where connections drop, and where a 200 MB video is a real expense. That describes most of WhatsApp’s two billion users and nearly all of Bangladesh’s. It is also why SHAREit — a Chinese app that has been banned in India over security concerns and is loaded with advertising everywhere — has stayed installed on so many phones here: it does one thing that WhatsApp, until now, could not.
What it means for the copied apps
When the platform absorbs a feature, the standalone app that provided it loses its reason to exist; WhatsApp did this to SMS, to Skype and to the “status” apps before it. SHAREit and Xender will keep advantages for a while — cross-platform transfers to laptops, no account needed — but the daily case, phone to phone between two people who both have WhatsApp, will move. For users the net effect is good: one fewer ad-laden app with broad file permissions, and a transfer that is encrypted rather than open to anyone on the same Wi-Fi.
Until it arrives
Android’s built-in Quick Share (formerly Nearby Share) and Apple’s AirDrop already do offline transfers between phones of the same platform, without SHAREit’s baggage. They are the safer choice today; WhatsApp’s version will be the convenient one tomorrow.
Source: India Today, via Prothom Alo.
