Flying Carpet

Last reviewed Sep 13, 2026 · 892 words

Flying Carpet is the tool you want on the day the Wi-Fi is down. It moves files between exactly two devices by turning one of them into a temporary wireless hotspot and joining the other to it, so a 4 GB video goes laptop-to-laptop in a field, a train or a client's office with no router, no internet and nothing installed on a server. There is no daemon, no container and no port to open. If you came here looking for a self-hosted AirDrop that runs on your home network all day, that is LocalSend; Flying Carpet is the fallback for when there is no network to be on.

It is a desktop and mobile app, not a service

Nothing about Flying Carpet is hosted. It is a single Rust binary (with a Tauri front end on desktop) at 5,318 GitHub stars, GPL-3.0, with builds for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS. You run it on both devices at the moment of transfer, pick one to host the ad hoc network, and the other joins. When the copy finishes, the hotspot goes away and your devices reconnect to whatever they were on before. That makes it the odd one out on a self-hosting index: there is no uptime to worry about, no updates to schedule and no backup. Its place in your stack is a folder on every laptop and a home-screen icon on every phone, next to a note that says "use this when Syncthing can't see the other machine".

How a transfer actually works

The flow is the same on every platform. Open the app on both devices. Choose Send on one and Receive on the other. One device creates the hotspot (on desktop, the app does this itself; on iOS the phone shows you the network to join manually), and a short password or QR code links the two so nobody else in the room can hop on. Traffic is encrypted end to end using a key derived from that shared secret, then the files stream directly over the ad hoc link at whatever your Wi-Fi radios can manage, which in my experience is 20 to 40 MB/s on modern laptops and rather less to an old phone. Two-device only is a real limit: there is no "send to all", no history and no clipboard sharing.

Setup varies by OS, and this is the part that bites

The catalogue lists this as Easy, and on the device pair you use every week it is. The friction is the first run on each platform, because creating an ad hoc network needs OS privileges that each system grants differently.

Windows needs the app run with permission to create a hosted network, and a few Wi-Fi drivers refuse to do it at all; if the hotspot never appears, that driver is usually why. macOS asks for Location permission before it will let any app list or create Wi-Fi networks, which surprises people who have never seen a file-transfer tool ask for location. Linux needs either NetworkManager or wpa_supplicant available, and the app will call out which it found. On Android the system hotspot API does the work; on iOS the app cannot create the network, so the iPhone joins one the other device creates. None of this is hard, but do the first transfer at home rather than discovering the permission prompt in front of someone.

Where it sits next to LocalSend and PairDrop

The three names that come up together are not rivals for the same moment.

LocalSend is the bigger project and the one I install first, because in daily life the devices usually share a network. Flying Carpet earns its slot by working when that assumption fails: hotel Wi-Fi with client isolation on, a locked-down office guest network, or a camping trip with two laptops and a drone. The catalogue's file-sync category covers the always-on options if you want one of those as well.

What it is not

It is not an AirDrop replacement for the "tap a button, it's already there" feeling, because you still need both devices ready and one of them to build a network first, which takes 10 to 20 seconds. It is not a way to reach a machine on the other side of the internet. It is not a sync tool, and it has no idea what it sent last week. Treat it as a very good USB stick that happens to be wireless.

What I'd do

Install LocalSend on everything and use it 95 % of the time. Put Flying Carpet on the same devices, run one test transfer per platform so the permission prompts are already answered, and forget about it until the day the network is not there. For a two-laptop handover of a 30 GB project folder in a place with no infrastructure, it is faster than any cloud, safer than a stranger's Wi-Fi and free.