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Guide

Send large files between computers and phones — no account, nothing to install

Updated 2026-08-08 · 7 min read

Every few weeks the same thing happens. A video that is too big for email. A folder of RAW photos that the chat app insists on squashing. A database dump you need on the laptop across the desk, and a USB stick that is somewhere in a drawer. The file is right there on one screen and you need it on another screen two feet away, and somehow that is a twenty-minute problem.

This is a guide to solving it with nothing but a browser tab on each device — no sign-up, no app store, no cable, and no cloud account holding your file hostage behind a storage quota.

Why this is still annoying in 2026

It is worth naming the reasons, because each one rules out a different tool and that is how you end up with no tool at all.

• Email caps attachments at 25 MB on Gmail and Outlook. A single phone video clears that in about 40 seconds of recording.
• Chat apps compress. Send a photo through most messengers and what comes out the other end is not the photo you sent — it is a smaller, softer copy. Fine for a meme, useless for a print job.
• AirDrop is Apple-only, and it has to be Apple on both ends. The moment one side is a Windows laptop or an Android phone, it is not an option.
• Cloud drives make you wait twice: once for the whole file to go up, then again for it to come down. And they want an account, on both ends, before anything happens.
• Cables have become a lottery. Which end, which adaptor, and does this phone even mount as a disk on this operating system.

What each option actually costs you

The browser way, start to finish

The whole flow is five steps and takes about twenty seconds once you have done it once.

1. On the sending device, open sendxa.app and drop the file onto the page. Several files at once is fine.

2. The page shows a 9-digit ID and a 6-digit code. There is also a Copy link button if the other person is not in the room with you.

3. On the receiving device, open the same address, pick the Receive tab, and type the two numbers. Or just open the link — no typing.

4. The file list appears. Hit Download on the file you want, or Download all.

5. Keep the sending page open until the transfer finishes. That is the one rule; everything else takes care of itself.

That last step is not a bug, it is the point. The file does not get uploaded anywhere when you drop it. All that goes to the server is a list of names and sizes. The bytes stay on your disk until the other side actually presses Download, and then they flow straight through to that device without ever being written down in the middle. That is why there is no storage quota, why a file of tens of gigabytes is fine, and why nobody has to remember to delete anything afterwards — there is nothing to delete.

Four directions, four guides

The steps are the same whichever way the file is going, but the details differ — where the file lands on a phone, what a browser will and will not let you write to disk, what happens when the screen locks. Each direction has its own guide, linked at the end of this page.

• Computer to computer — the everyday case: laptop to desktop, Mac to Windows, work machine to home machine.
• Computer to phone — getting a video or a set of documents off the laptop and onto the phone you are about to walk out the door with.
• Phone to computer — the one people search for most: photos and videos off the phone, at full quality, without a cable.
• Phone to phone — including the awkward one, iPhone to Android, where AirDrop and Quick Share both give up.

How big can the file be

32.0 GB per file, and as many files as you like in one session, up to 500 of them. There is no daily cap and no counter that runs out.

At that size, interruptions are not a possibility, they are a certainty — Wi-Fi drops, a phone locks, a laptop decides to sleep. So a transfer that breaks does not start over. The receiving side remembers how many bytes it already has and asks for the rest from exactly that point, and the page reconnects on its own up to 30 times, waiting a little longer each attempt. The Stop button is a pause, not a cancel: what has arrived stays, and the button turns into Resume. Pressing the wrong button 40 minutes into a 20 GB file should not cost you the 20 GB.

What makes it fast, and what makes it slow

Before anything moves, the two browsers try to open a direct connection to each other. If that works, the data does not touch our server at all — not one byte. On the same Wi-Fi network that means local network speed, and even across the internet it is dramatically faster than bouncing through a server in Singapore.

The same 6 MB file, measured on this service

When a direct connection cannot be made — some corporate networks and a few mobile carriers block it — the transfer quietly falls back to going through the server. Nothing breaks; it is just slower. And when it is slower, the thing holding it back is almost always the sending device's upload speed. Home internet connections routinely give you ten times more download than upload, so a file crawling out of a laptop on home broadband will crawl no matter what the receiving end does.

Two practical consequences. First: if both devices can be put on the same Wi-Fi, do that — it is the single biggest speed difference available to you. Second: if the transfer is slow, check the upload speed of the device that is sending, not the one that is waiting.

Who can see the file

The file is never written to our disk, so there is nothing on our side to read, leak, or subpoena. A few more details that matter:

• The 6-digit code locks out after 10 wrong guesses on a given ID. Without that, working through a million combinations is a few minutes of scripting.
• The share link puts its code after the hash in the address. Browsers never send that part to any server, so it does not appear in access logs, in the Referer header, or in any proxy record along the way. The page also wipes it out of the address bar as soon as it has read it.
• Everything runs over port 443, the same port as any HTTPS website, so it works from behind a corporate firewall without anyone opening anything.
• No account means no profile, no email address on file, and nothing to delete later.

When to use something else

Honesty is more useful than a sales pitch. If both devices are Apple and both are in the same room, AirDrop is fewer taps and you should use it. If you need the file to sit somewhere for a week while three colleagues get around to downloading it, that is what a cloud drive is for. If you are moving 500 GB, use a disk and your feet.

The browser transfer wins in the gap those leave behind: two devices that do not share an ecosystem, a file too big for email, nobody wanting to install anything, and both people available right now.