Xiaomi, Vivo, Oppo band together to hopefully improve file transfer speeds between their phones

An initiative of the newly formed “Peer-to-Peer Transmission Alliance”, the new system enables seamless cross-brand file transfer. Just like Apple accomplished with AirDrop and what Google is attempting with Fast Share

An initiative of the newly formed “Peer-to-Peer Transmission Alliance”, the new system enables seamless cross-brand file transfer. Just like Apple accomplished with AirDrop and what Google is attempting with Fast Share (Saumya Khandelwal/ Hindustan Times)

Xiaomi, Vivo and Oppo have just announced a partnership to bring a new wireless file transfer system to their users. An initiative of the newly formed Peer-to-Peer Transmission Alliance, the transfer system will make sharing files over smartphones easier and faster, at least between devices by the three manufacturers involved right now.

The Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Transmission Alliance was established to create a seamless file sharing experience between multiple brands that did not exist earlier. The new transfer system will let Xiaomi, Vivo and Oppo users easily transfer files between their smartphones without having to rely on other third party apps or data networks. The transfer will also support a wide range of files like photos, music, video, documents etc. and is supposed to roll out from February onwards.

How does it work?

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Essentially, the file transfer system designed here is the same as Apple's Airdrop feature. It uses Bluetooth Low Energy to pair devices and then uses their respective WiFi chips to transfer the data. The file being transferred is actually being shared over a WiFi P2P or WiFi (Direct) network.

This increases the transfer speed for files and allows larger files to be shared quickly. Of course, Airdrop's transfer speeds serve as an example of what these companies would hope to achieve. The new transfer system comes with a promise of an average transfer speed of 20mbps.

In case you're wondering, a WiFi Direct connection doesn't interrupt your phone's existing WiFi connection. And the fact that it's a P2P network means no "mobile data" will be used to share information.

Is this new? No

On paper, a new file transfer system that will let you send files to any other device without glitches sounds great. But it's not a new concept. As mentioned above, this seems to be a take on Apple's Airdrop.

What's unclear is whether this version will share files over an encrypted network. In Airdrop, each device creates a firewall and files are encrypted for transit between devices. So, just in case someone does steal a file being transferred, they won't be able to read or use it.

On the other hand, Google has also been working on something called Fast Share (an option that is going to replace the very slow Android Beam; support for Android Beam also ended with Android 10 so that's that), which will also be using Bluetooth and WiFi to make quick transfers.

Fast Share is not operational yet, we'll just have to see what Google pulls off once it actually launches, but when it does, it could make these companies' initiative redundant.