After a year of tease, Nearby Share was finally unveiled by Google in August, this year. Currently, Nearby Share is available only on Android smartphones running Android 6.0 or above. The company has stated that Nearby Share will be coming to Chromebooks (already in Beta) and Chrome browser across platforms. While that’s exciting news for users who are part of multiple ecosystems, there is an elementary flaw in Nearby Share that is pretty infuriating. And in this article, I am going to address that problem. So without any delay, let’s go ahead and learn about the issue in detail.
Without beating around the bush, let me get straight to the point. Nearby Share is a great technology, but it has been marred by some weird issue that holds back its performance. In my experience and testing so far, I have witnessed extremely slow file transfer when both devices are connected to a common WiFi network.
Is Nearby Share Really That Slow?
No. Nearby Share is actually not slow and you discover that when you are not connected to a WiFi network. Surprisingly, when both the devices are not connected to a WiFi access point, you will find that Nearby Share just flies through and transfers the files much quickly.
However, when you are connected to a WiFi Network, it seems Nearby Share is choosing WebRTC or Bluetooth protocol which results in a much slower transfer. It goes on to show that Nearby Share’s algorithm is not fine-tuned to pick the right protocol and often, it picks the wrong ones to transfer files.
Google’s Nearby Share Needs Improvement
As we went through the article, it’s clear that the Nearby Share algorithm is unable to determine the right protocol for file sharing, especially when devices are connected to a WiFi network. We hope that Google fixes the issue and brings faster file sharing — no matter whether the device is connected to an access point or not.
