Promised nothing airdrop support, but gave us nothing in return

Nothing has had a successful year so far, with its new Nothing phone 4A Pro selling better than the company expected. Continuing the momentum, today, Nothing has launched a new app, Nothing Warp, which allows Android users to transfer files between their Android phone and their Windows desktop or MacBook.

Nothing Warp started as an internal tool for file transfers, but the company has now released it to the public. Its purpose is to allow users to seamlessly send files, links, copied text and images between devices. You will need two apps – nothing wrong on your Android phone or tablet, and Nothing Warp Browser Extension For Google Chrome on MacOS, Windows and Linux. You need to sign in to both devices using the same Google account.

Once set up, the Nothing Warp app integrates directly into the Android Share menu. The app also uses Google Drive (associated with your signed-in Google account) to transfer files and data, so the app itself doesn’t store or access your data.

We tried Nothing Warp to transfer images and PDFs from a Nothing Phone 4A to a MacBook Air, and it was a surprisingly seamless experience. You have to share the file you want to transfer to Nothing Warp, which then uploads it to Google Drive, and the file appears in your Nothing Warp Chrome extension. It works the same way the other way around.

What it claims to do, it does it well and surprisingly quickly, although this probably also depends on your Internet connection and the size of your files.

One could argue that if you’re technically just uploading files to Google Drive, you can do that yourself without extra apps as middlemen, and they’d be right – you can do it all yourself without extra apps and without giving those extra apps permission on your data.

Nothing Warp doesn’t solve some edge cases, such as when Drive zips multiple files for download, which can be annoying if you only have a few images you want to download individually (Nothing Warp couldn’t multi-download in our limited testing).

If you are worried about your Google Drive being clogged with unnecessary files that you only had to transfer and not archive or backup, don’t worry, because we could not detect any transferred files or their remnants in Google Drive. Nothing Warp deletes the files from your drive when the transfer is complete.

The Nothing Warp browser extension requires extensive permissions, so privacy-conscious users may still prefer other solutions.

Nothing Warp works on all Android phones, not just Android phones, so that’s a plus. However, to transfer files between Android and Windows, you can use Google Quick Share. Nothing promised that AirDrop-compatible Quick Share support would soon come to Nothing phones, allowing them to transfer files with macOS and iPhones, but months after the promise, that still hasn’t happened. While Nothing Warp does what it says, other file transfer solutions work a little better.