Google Nearby for Linux

🚧 Under Construction 🚧

This repo is actively being worked on. Things are buggy, builds may fail, documentation is non-existent, and we test in prod.

You have been warned

---

Demo

demo.mp4

What

This repo consists of the entirety of google's open source nearby library. Currently, it is seperated into 3 (now 2) sections.

• Sharing
• Connections
• Presence ( Was removed by google from their repo. RIP :( )

Linux specific implementation and compatibility shims are provided for building Sharing and Connections.

Why

This repo could've been a PR on the official repo. All I've done is implement the platform abstraction layer google has provided for a linux specific environment. It's not like I haven't made a PR towards the official repo. I got tired of begging the official nearby maintainers for a PR review. So here we are.

Moreover, all I've wanted was seamless file sharing between my android devices and my linux workstation + laptop. With this repo and the example application provided here, it accomplishes that goal perfectly. This repo wasn't created out of any altruistic goals or out of the goodness of my heart. I had a problem. I solved it. Simple as that.

How

How to use

Proper documentation is coming I swear. University's getting pretty hectic so docs is on the backburner. The wiki has some more information but it's nowhere near a proper documentation. It has some good brief overviews and where generally everything is located if you're thinking about contributing.

If you want any clarification on anything, feel free to open an issue. I'll get back to you ASAP.

As a consolation prize, I've indexed this project using Deepwiki. You might have strong feeling about AI use. But I feel like documenting very large codebases is a perfect usecase for such models. (They are called Large Language Models for a reason )

How to install

This repo provides prebuilt binaries of the Quick Share application. The only officially supported distro is Fedora 43 for now. The newest ubuntu images should work fine although that needs to be tested. I want to support more distros so if you encounter issues installing on your distro, please let me know.

NOTE: Previosly, the quickshare binary required the sdbus-cpp v2 library installed on the system. This is no longer the case and it is bundled with the shared library. Hopefully this expands compatibility

Prerequisites

• systemd
• NetworkManager
• bluez >= 5.85

To install the prerequisites, run this command

sudo dnf install -y \
  bluez bluez-libs bluez-libs-devel \
  sdbus-cpp sdbus-cpp-devel

---

To install the Quick Share application,

1. Go to releases
2. Download the latest nearby-file-share-linux-*.tar.gz
3. mkdir -p nearby && tar -xf nearby-file-share-linux-*.tar.gz -C nearby
4. cd nearby
5. chmod +x install_nearby_file_share.sh
6. ./install_nearby_file_share.sh

To install the actual library and headers,

Currently there are no prebuilt shared library or headers. You'll have to build them yourself

How to build

Check the wiki

Wiki isn't built yet. Best place to consult would be the Github actions and workflows.

How to contribute

Check the wiki

TODO

Development is paused until my next break (around mid-June.)

---

🔴 P0 - Critical / Core Functionality

Issues that break core functionality. These should be addressed immediately.

• Merge latest upstream changes

• Moving away from google's own implementation of QuickShare

  Till now, we've relied upon a few compatibility stubs here and there to get the sharing library to a buildable state. Going forward it's increasinly unlikely that will remain the case. I am seeing much more activity in that portion of the repo from google's side. It seems to me as an outsider, that they are trying to abstract away the closed source certificates and account logic. Which is appreciated of course, but this breaks all my compatibility shims :(

  So I'll need to avoid touching the turbulent sharing/ directory till it becomes stable enough. In the meantime, I'll probably need to access the sharing functionality using interfaces/adapters

• Bluetooth classic bandwidth

  File transfer on bluetooth classic is painfully slow. Bandwidth close to 20KB/s. May be a regression issue after bluetooth socket refactor. May be an issue with sending back acknowledgements. Issue is present on pre-refactor versions. Look into Multiplexing maybe Multiplexing did not fix it : (?

• Linux → Android file sharing is unreliable Investigate why and fix it. Possibly related to proprietary certificate changes. Should probably add unit tests and integration tests for each medium. Everything is so fucking buggy it makes me wanna rip my fucking eyes out. Might be related to recent upstream changes. I could probably properly test linux -> linux bidirectional sharing. Will need to simulate a lot of hardware stuff though. Since there's no stable reference platform to write automatic tests against writing linux to linux tests could be like clown to clown communication

  

• QR code scanning does not work.

  Likely related to the Linux → Android sharing issue above. I did get it working once in a very old build. So it shouldn't impossible. Unless google changed something

---

🟠 P1 - Important Annoyances

Problems that are not fully blocking, but noticeably affect usability.

• Investigate why Bluetooth connection requests pairing.

  Both the L2CAP socket and Bluetooth profile should be unauthenticated.

• Handle existing files when receiving.

  Currently, files are not overwritten if they already exist. Decide whether to overwrite, rename, or skip.

---

🟡 P2 - Quality of Life / Cleanup

Improvements that would make the project cleaner, smoother, or easier to maintain.

• Bluetooth Classic transfer progress issue.

  When transferring Android → Linux, Android shows 100% transferred but still says Sending..., while Linux lags behind. Could be a bottleneck or Android-side issue.

• Add tests for basically everything.

• Clean up implementation/linux.

  Linux-specific implementation files are currently all in one directory. This matches the other platforms, but creates visual bloat.

• Document basically everything.

  This would be a large project on its own.

• Resolve random crashes in the Quick Share application.

---

🔵 P3 - New Features

Non-essential features and future improvements.

• Fast initiation implementation for linux
• Upstream has been slowly adding webrtc support. Should we support it?

Special thanks

https://github.com/proatgram and https://github.com/vibhavp

they were the original authors of the linux platform support PR that I have based much of this codebase upon. I am standing on the shoulders of giants