KDE Connect 4+

For an open-source app, I am impressed with how good it is. Sending files and photos/videos from my phone to my laptop works seamlessly. And so does using the remote input.

A couple things don’t work though:
- I can’t receive files from my computer. I use the Gnome extension to send a jpeg to my phone and the KDE Connect iOS app just vibrates, no photo in my camera roll or iCloud Drive.
- The “ping” feature only works if the app is open. Looks like the app needs to integrate with Apple’s notification framework to deliver these notifications while the app is in the background.

I’m blown away by the user experience in this app. Just by installing the `kdeconnect` package on my desktop, I could find my machine and pair within minutes. The UI is laid out cleanly and uses Apple’s native design principles, so it feels like a stock app.

Meanwhile, on my Macbook Air, I constantly need to reboot both my laptop and phone just to use features like clipboard sharing and AirDrop! This has been an issue ever since macOS Catalina.

The KDE team made iOS integration that “just works” better than Apple could, and I can’t recommend this app enough. It works on any linux setup, but I run KDE Plasma and it’s beautifully integrated.

Apple must have recently changed something iOS, because it used to be easy to just plug your phone in, navigate to the file folder, and move the pictures and videos to your pc. Now, you can only do one picture at a time (videos still work fine for some reason), it’s a downscaled version of it, and it won’t move half the time, only copy. KDE Connect works perfectly to solve that problem. It’s not quite as fast as the direct transferring used to be, but since that’s no longer an option, this gets the job done well.