Last updated: 2026-07-03
AirDrop is one of the best file-sharing experiences ever shipped. Between an iPhone, iPad and Mac it is fast, private, and effortlessly built into the system — Relayium does not pretend to beat it on Apple's home turf.
The catch is the boundary: AirDrop only talks to other Apple devices. This article compares the two fairly, explains where AirDrop is genuinely better, and shows where Relayium helps — sending between an iPhone and a Windows PC, an Android phone and a Mac, or a Linux laptop and an iPad, straight from the browser.
AirDrop uses Apple Wireless Direct Link to bring up a peer-to-peer Wi-Fi connection between two nearby devices, with Bluetooth handling discovery. The result is quick, direct, and works even when neither device is on a network — no router, no internet, no account.
It is also deeply integrated: the share sheet is one tap away in every app, transfers are encrypted, and received files land in the right place automatically. For moving photos or documents around inside an all-Apple household, it is hard to beat.
AirDrop simply does not exist for Windows, Android or Linux. There is no official client and no interoperability, so the moment one side of the transfer is not an Apple device, AirDrop is not an option at all.
That is exactly the gap most people hit: an iPhone photo that needs to reach a Windows PC, an Android video going to a Mac, or files moving between a Linux workstation and an iPad. The usual workarounds — a cable, email to yourself, or a cloud upload and re-download — are slower and route your files through someone else's server.
Relayium runs entirely in a modern web browser with nothing to install, so any two devices that can open a web page can transfer to each other regardless of platform: Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS all interoperate. On the same Wi-Fi, both devices open relayium.com and discover each other automatically; on different networks you connect with a short pairing code instead.
The transfer itself goes directly peer-to-peer over WebRTC whenever possible, with a second, independent encryption layer on top: an X25519 key exchange derives a key used for per-chunk AES-256-GCM, and that key never reaches any server. Both devices show the same 6-digit verification code (a Short Authentication String) so you can confirm no one sits in the middle, and each file is checked end-to-end with a SHA-256 hash. You can send up to 10 files per batch, realtime transfers need no account, and if the connection drops the transfer can resume instead of restarting.
This is the part to be upfront about: receiving large files in a mobile browser is not as smooth as native AirDrop. Safari and Firefox buffer the incoming file in memory, so on an iPhone or iPad it is best to keep transfers under about 200 MB to stay comfortably within what the browser can hold.
On desktop the story is better: Chrome and Edge can stream directly to disk, which removes the size cap entirely, so large files flow without filling up memory. When a direct connection is impossible, the encrypted stream falls back to a TURN relay that only ever sees ciphertext, so it stays end-to-end encrypted. There is also an optional stored download-link mode — your browser encrypts the files with AES-256-GCM and the key lives only in the URL fragment, so the server holds zero-knowledge ciphertext it cannot read; creating such a link requires the sender to sign in, while realtime transfers do not.
The differences that matter most, side by side:
No — AirDrop is exclusive to Apple devices and has no Windows client. Relayium is the cross-platform alternative: it runs in any browser, so a Windows PC can send to and receive from an iPhone or Mac just as easily as between two Apple devices.
Open relayium.com in a browser on both devices. On the same Wi-Fi they discover each other automatically; otherwise enter the pairing code shown on one device into the other. Pick up to 10 files, confirm the 6-digit verification code matches on both screens, and the transfer runs directly between them.
No. Relayium is a web page — there is nothing to install on either device, on any operating system. It is free and open source under the MIT license at github.com/relayium/relayium, so you can audit it or run your own instance.
Send between Apple and everything else — no install, and no account needed for realtime transfers.
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