Tarish is file sharing for de‑Googled Android that works with AirDrop and Quick Share. Send a file to a MacBook from a phone that has never spoken to Google: the Mac shows a real device name and a normal AirDrop prompt. Send to a Windows laptop or another Android phone and Quick Share does the same. Nothing signs in, nothing checks in, and no Google application is installed.
01 — What works
Tested against real peers, not only against itself: macOS and iOS for AirDrop, Windows 11 and stock Android for Quick Share. Passing against one vendor proves very little, and that distinction has caught bugs no amount of self‑testing would.
| AirDrop Apple | Quick Share Android, Windows | |
|---|---|---|
| Discovery | AWDL and mDNS | mDNS on Wi‑Fi, Bluetooth LE off‑network |
| Send | Works | Works |
| Receive | Works | Works |
| Shared network | Works | 22 MB/s measured |
| No shared network | AWDL is its own link | Wi‑Fi Direct 10.5 MB/s; Bluetooth ~150 KB/s to start |
| Both at once | On BCM4390 devices, concurrently and in opposite directions. Not on BCM4383 — see Devices. | |
02 — Why
It cannot do AirDrop at all. Google’s AirDrop support needs its
mosey stack running with platform privileges. Getting it working that way needed
privileged Play Services, not the sandboxed kind, plus a successful check‑in to
Google’s servers to receive a feature flag. That is a long way from installing an app.
And for many people the objection is the code, not the sandbox. Sandboxed Play Services is still Google’s code on your device. Plenty of people who choose a de‑Googled OS do not want it there at any privilege level. That is a legitimate position, and it should not cost you file sharing with the people around you.
03 — How it works
A native daemon has no foreground‑service requirement, so there is no permanent notification, and doze and app standby do not apply to it. It keeps AWDL up, answers mDNS, terminates TLS and runs both protocol state machines. The part that parses input from strangers runs as its own unprivileged uid and holds nothing else.
tarishd · tarishsharingd · libtarish_protocol
Bluetooth LE, Wi‑Fi Direct groups and the share sheet are framework API a native daemon cannot reach; the app creates them and hands the daemon a file descriptor. It is where a person says yes or no, and where managed policy is read. It holds no protocol state.
share sheet · prompts · inbox · policy
Quick Share is ours top to bottom. For AirDrop, the radio and the AWDL protocol come from two vendor files that already ship in the Pixel vendor image and run on a build with no Google packages — using them adds nothing that was not already on the device. Replacing them is a separate track that has not started.
| AirDrop layer | Whose | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Radio and MAC | Vendor | wonder.ko, already in the stock image. No AWDL protocol in it |
| AWDL protocol | Vendor | libmosey_daemon_ffi.so — election, sync, peer discovery |
IP on mosey0 | Ours | including the routing Android’s fwmark model requires |
| mDNS, TLS, HTTP, plist, cpio | Ours | tarishsharingd |
| Share sheet, prompts, consent | Ours | the app |
libtarish_protocol — UKEY2, D2D keys, SecureMessage, the secure
channel and the sharing state machines — is deliberately Android‑free so it tests on a
build host: 202 tests, including a whole share between two peers
in‑process, compared byte for byte.
04 — Devices
Tarish needs wonder.ko bound to the Wi‑Fi driver. Every Pixel 10 image
ships drivers for both chips and loads whichever matches the silicon, so the model name tells you
nothing. Check the device itself:
adb shell 'lsmod | grep bcmdhd' # 4390 = good, 4383 = no wondertap
adb shell 'ls /sys/class/ieee80211/' # a `wonder` wiphy is the real test| Device | Chip | AirDrop | Quick Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pixel 10 Pro blazer | BCM4390 | AWDL and Wi‑Fi coexist | Works |
| Pixel 10 Pro XL mustang | BCM4390 | AWDL and Wi‑Fi coexist | Works |
| Pixel 10 frankel | BCM4383 | Works, but takes the radio | Works |
| Pixel 10 Pro Fold rango | unverified | unverified | expected to work |
| Pixel 10a stallion | no wonder.ko | Not possible | Works |
With no wondertap, AWDL falls back to a path that takes the physical radio:
Wi‑Fi drops within about ten seconds of AirDrop becoming active and returns on its own
10–24 seconds after it is switched off. Stock Android behaves the same on this hardware.
Nothing needs a reboot, but AirDrop and Quick Share over Wi‑Fi are mutually exclusive
there. For a daily driver, prefer a BCM4390 device.
An iPhone keeps a sparse AWDL presence to save power — available in 4 of 16 windows where our devices are in 16 of 16. Device to device runs 7.7–9.1 MB/s; iPhone to device 2.6–4.7 MB/s.
05 — Design positions
Anything else means a phone quietly discoverable in a bag. The screen is held awake while it advertises, so the device never goes off the air while still reporting itself available.
Consent is enforced where the bytes move, not in the UI, so an app that hides its send button cannot be bypassed by calling the interface directly.
A pinned control is shown disabled and labelled rather than hidden. A control that silently refuses to move reads as a broken app, not as an enforced policy.
That costs a one‑line framework patch: since Android B only uid 0 and 1000 may touch the local network by default, and a native daemon can never earn the permission any other way.
06 — For OS builders
Tarish is part of the operating system, not an app from a store: a daemon with its own SELinux domain and a privileged app. The integration guide is written for someone who has never seen the project.
LineageOS is the next target. If you maintain GrapheneOS, LineageOS or another AOSP build and want this in the image, please open an issue.
07 — Open issues
The project keeps its open work in TODO.md, which leads with what does not work rather than with what does.
08 — Credits
An open Quick Share implementation for Android. No code from it is used — this is a fresh implementation in another language and process model — but it worked out protocol details and wrote down why they matter.
The Open Wireless Link research on AWDL, and OpenDrop, established what AirDrop looks like on the wire.
Where a constant exists because someone else found it first, the comment beside it in the source says so.