Google’s ‘Self Share’ tool could make you stop emailing yourself files

We’ve all been there before: we need to send a file from our phone to our laptop or vice versa, only to find that it can still be a surprisingly clunky process even in 2022. While most of us will resort to sending ourselves an email or uploading a file to cloud storage, Google is apparently working on a way to make it easy and intuitive to send files to yourself.

The company recently launched Nearby Share on ChromeOS and Android as a competitor to Apple’s AirDrop, allowing you to easily send files to nearby devices. The only problem is that it’s not super convenient when you’re trying to share files with your own devices. But as spotted by Chrome Story, the Chromium Gerrit has recently launched an experimental flag in Chrome called “Self Share,” which would let you… well, it’s pretty self-explanatory.

Once the flag is enabled, you should be able to see a new ‘Send to your devices’ option in the nearby share menu. Like regular Nearby Sharing, Chrome OS would choose theoretically choose the best way to send the file (whether that’s Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, etc) so it arrives as quickly as possible.

The feature is arriving for folks on the Canary development channel, so it’ll be a while until regular users have access to it, but it’s nonetheless a welcome addition. Though the feature is launching for Chrome OS, it’s not hard to imagine Google is looking to expand the feature to other devices. At CES 2022, the company announced it was bringing Nearby Share to Windows (although it’s technically been in the works for years), so it’s reasonable to assume Google would want to offer similar self-sharing functionality eventually as well.

Frankly, I’m much more interested in this feature than regular Nearby Share. The fact that I’m a homebody living through a pandemic aside, I send myself files much more often than I do other people. When I do send a file to other people, I usually have time to upload a file to cloud storage or send it in an email. Meanwhile, when I’m sending something to myself, I’m often more concerned with sending the file as quickly as possible. Here’s hoping the feature is implemented smoothly and widely enough to be worth our time.

Via Ars Tecnica