Quick Share for Mac: why it doesn't exist — and what works instead
You can beam a file from a Galaxy to a Windows laptop in seconds. Point the same phone at a Mac and… nothing. That gap is not an oversight — and there are real ways around it.
Why there is no official Quick Share on the Mac
Samsung's Quick Share and Google's Nearby Share merged into a single Quick Share in 2024, and the official desktop app targets Windows only. On Apple's side, the wireless stack that makes AirDrop instant is private to Apple devices, and macOS does not expose to third parties the low-level Bluetooth/Wi-Fi behavior Quick Share's handshake depends on. Neither Samsung nor Google has ever announced Mac support — after years of Windows-only releases, the message is clear.
What the community built — and where it stops
| Option | Direction | The catch |
|---|---|---|
| NearDrop | Receive only | An impressive unofficial open-source project that lets a Mac receive Quick Share files. It cannot send, is not affiliated with Google, and can break whenever the protocol shifts. |
| LocalSend | Both ways | Free, open source, works well — but both devices need the app, transfers run at shared Wi-Fi speed, and big batches (say, 20 GB of camera footage) are painful. |
| Cloud (Drive, Photos) | Both ways | Upload then download again. Hours for large batches, possible recompression, storage costs, and your files leave your devices. |
| USB cable | Phone → Mac | The fastest and most private path — if you have software that actually uses it well, which is where the Mac has been stuck since Android File Transfer died. |
Wireless is for convenience. The cable is for real work.
Quick Share's magic is convenience for a handful of files. But the moment you are moving a camera roll — dozens of gigabytes of 4K video — no wireless option competes with a USB 3 cable: up to ~380 MB/s, no shared network, no cloud in the middle.
ZiggSend is the Mac app built for exactly that: it lives in the menu bar, detects any Android the moment you plug it in, shows what's new, pulls everything at full cable speed and verifies every file byte for byte — corrupted transfers are discarded and flagged, never silently kept. When you don't need max speed, it can switch to your own Wi-Fi network too. No file manager, no terminal, no account.