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. It is still with beta testers, and WhatsApp has neither announced it nor named a 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.
Why the apps it replaces became a problem
SHAREit and Xender earned their place on every phone in the market by solving a real problem, and then became something people were advised to remove. Both things are true, and the reason is in the business model rather than the file transfer.
A free transfer app earns nothing from transferring files, so it earns from advertising — and the versions that spread here carried aggressive ad libraries, full-screen interstitials, notification ads and recommendation feeds that kept running when the app was not. To work at all they also ask for the broadest permissions on the phone: all storage, location, nearby devices, the ability to install packages. That combination, in an app updated through unofficial channels on budget handsets, is how a useful tool becomes the least trustworthy thing on the device.
A transfer feature inside WhatsApp earns nothing either, but WhatsApp is already paid for by other means, already has the storage permission, and is updated through the Play Store. That is the whole of the improvement, and it is a large one.
Source: India Today, via Prothom Alo.
