Anyone has a fool proof method? Preferably that does not involve third party apps, or a Foss one.
PS at home I use mixplorer over my home WiFi, but on the go WiFi direct would be useful. I use a Samsung smartphone and lenovo tablet, both on android 14. I can easily connect them, but I never see any WiFi direct option in the share menu (nor Samsung’s quickshare)
EDIT: Enabling Quickshare on both devices then the quickshare icon shows up in the share menu.
Although:
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it asks to deactivate WiFi direct (as Markaos says below, probably so it can decide the best connection type, and probably active WiFi direct on demand)
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it relies on the contacts of the Google account. As I use a dummy and different gmail on both, and Foss apps for contacts, the only way to share is to “allow sharing with everyone for 10 minutes”
So my question remains as to how to use Wi-Fi direct well…directly.
It is I that misunderstood the whole thing.
But since we’re here, I use an SSH server app worth about $3 on my phone to access it from other devices with an SFTP or SSHFS client. The app is literally called “SSH Server”. Once the server is active I can use an app like Solid Explorer (free with ads or paying for a license) on another Android device to connect to my phone on the same Wi-Fi network. Or from Windows I can just map a network drive using the format \\sshfs\user@ip. And on Linux just find the “Connect to server” option in your favorite file explorer to use SSHFS. Or any SFTP client of your choice.
I’m not familiar with Wi-Fi Direct since I’ve been using SSH for years now, and certainly much more work this way, but it works okay across all my devices.
Thanks, that’s an interesting option. It reminded me that I used primitive ftpd a long time ago, which is a Foss app to create a local ftp server, which you can then browse from other devices. I had forgotten as it was probably 6 or 7 years ago, and I’m happy to see it’s still being developed. This still relies on a local network of course, like yours. I don’t know if it could work over mobile data, I suppose you would need to run a full server and a domain name. Mind you it is feasible