AirDrop is designed to be the easiest way to move files between Apple devices. You pick a file, hit Share, tap the other device, and expect it to land in seconds. Most of the time, that’s exactly what happens. Lately, though, even small files have started taking longer to send.
Sometimes the transfer completes. Other times, it sits on the sending screen with no clear sign of progress. That uncertainty became frustrating, not because AirDrop failed completely, but because I wasn’t trying to fix file sharing. I just wanted to send something and get back to work.
AirDrop worked until it didn’t
Reliability became the real issue
Digvijay Kumar / MakeUseOfCredit: Digvijay Kumar / MakeUseOf
The problem with AirDrop is not speed but reliability. Transfers stop working for no obvious reason. Sometimes the other device doesn’t show up at all, even when both are unlocked and sitting next to each other. Other times, it appears, I tap it, and the transfer stays stuck in waiting. Occasionally, it starts sending and then freezes halfway through.
The lack of feedback makes those failures harder to deal with. When something goes wrong, AirDrop doesn’t explain why. There’s no clear error message and no hint about what to try next, so you’re left guessing whether the transfer failed, got stuck, or is still trying in the background. I end up following the same routine every time. I try again, then turn AirDrop off and on. If that doesn’t help, I toggle Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. When nothing changes, I restart one device, then the other, and hope the next attempt goes through.
That guesswork changes how you use AirDrop. Instead of sending a file and moving on, you start watching the screen to see if it finishes. You keep checking the receiving device to see whether anything arrived. And when nothing shows up, you go back and repeat the whole process. After enough of that, I stopped using AirDrop for anything I needed to move quickly. At that point, speed mattered less to me than knowing whether a transfer was actually happening.
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GlideX removed the guesswork
No more watching stuck screens
Digvijay Kumar / MakeUseOfCredit: Digvijay Kumar / MakeUseOf
After AirDrop stalled on me enough times, I tried a few alternatives and ended up using GlideX. Not because it promised faster transfers, but because it tells me, right away, whether something is happening.
On the File Transfer screen, I drop files in and hit send, then I can see the result instead of guessing. The Activity Feed logs each attempt with the device name, file count, size, time, and a plain status like Completed. If a transfer fails or gets stopped, it shows that too. I even saw an entry marked Canceled in red, which is exactly the kind of honesty AirDrop never gives me.
Digvijay Kumar / MakeUseOfCredit: Digvijay Kumar / MakeUseOf
With AirDrop, I kept staring at the sending screen and checking the other device like I was waiting for a message. With GlideX, I send the file, glance at the feed once, and get back to work. If it finishes, the status says so. And if it doesn’t, I know that immediately, instead of falling into retries or toggles.
Cross-platform file sharing
Work moves across devices
Digvijay Kumar / MakeUseOfCredit: Digvijay Kumar / MakeUseOf
Another thing I appreciated about GlideX had nothing to do with raw transfer speed. It was what happened after tapping Send. With AirDrop, the story ends once the file lands on another Apple device. My work rarely stops there. The next step is often on a Windows PC or an Android phone, and that’s where AirDrop stops being useful, even if it worked perfectly five minutes earlier.
A photo might start on an Android phone, move to macOS for a quick edit, and then end up on a Windows PC for storage. Sometimes it goes in the other direction. I pull a draft from a Windows machine, review it on my iPhone, then send the final version to an Android phone before I head out. Instead of treating each step as a separate action, GlideX keeps that flow continuous.
That same continuity shows up in how the app looks and behaves. When I open GlideX on another device, I’m not reorienting myself. The layout stays familiar, the same sections remain in the sidebar, and the device list stays in view. I’m not stopping to figure out where the transfer option lives. The interface stays consistent enough that I can focus on the task instead of the app.
After the transfer finishes, the outcome stays predictable. Files land in the download location I’ve already set, rather than forcing me to track them down afterward. When I move to the next device, I already know where the file is waiting. I don’t need to check Recents, open a few apps, or search by filename to confirm where it went.
GlideX also has other tools in the menu, like mirroring, screen extension, and remote access, but I didn’t need those here. What mattered was that File Transfer worked the same way whether I was moving something from Android to Mac, Mac to Windows, or iPhone to Windows. That’s the gap AirDrop can’t cover, because it only connects Apple devices.
Moving files beyond AirDrop
GlideX turns file sharing from an unpredictable process into a stable workflow. It bridges the gaps AirDrop leaves when files move beyond a single ecosystem. AirDrop works well inside its own world, but real work often moves across devices. GlideX focuses on clarity rather than speed, providing the feedback and consistency that let file sharing fade into the background. For anyone tired of AirDrop’s stalls and silos, GlideX offers a dependable cross-platform alternative.
OS
Windows, macOS, iOS, Android
Price model
Free
GlideX is a cross-device screen mirroring and extending app that turns your phone or tablet into a second display, lets you control devices with one mouse/keyboard, transfer files fast, use your mobile camera as a webcam, make calls via PC, and access files remotely for smoother productivity.
