Nearby interconnection should be infrastructure
The internet connected devices half a world apart. Yet two devices one meter apart often can't hand each other a file without detouring through someone else's server.
Data isolation is a business model, not a technical limit
The radios are not the problem — your phone and your laptop already share Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. The walls are commercial: AirDrop stops at Apple's fence, Quick Share stops at Android and Windows, and every phone vendor ships its own incompatible "share" feature. Each ecosystem treats nearby sharing as a lock-in feature rather than as plumbing.
So the moment your devices span two ecosystems, your data is forced on a detour of thousands of kilometers — up to a cloud, through somebody's server, back down — to reach a device one meter away. You pay in bandwidth, in waiting, and in yet another copy of your data in someone else's hands.
What we believe
Sharing a file or a line of text with the device next to you should never route through anyone's server. Nearby interconnection should work like the internet's missing local layer: vendor-neutral, account-free, offline by design.
Apple proved how good this can feel — Continuity, Universal Clipboard: copy on the Mac, paste on the iPhone — then locked it inside one brand. We are building that experience for every mix of devices: files, clipboard, and eventually screens and input, between any phone, laptop, tablet or desktop, whoever made them.
The medium can be Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, NFC, USB or a QR code. The endgame is that every device speaks the same language — big or small, every device is an equal end.
The road there, honestly staged
Infrastructure status is earned, not claimed. Here is where we actually are:
The bridge
One app across macOS, iOS, Android, Windows and Linux that also speaks Android's built-in Quick Share — the other side doesn't even need Privli installed. Today, Privli is the vendor-neutral bridge between the walled gardens.
From sending to flowing
Clipboard sync and trusted devices that receive automatically are already shipping, so transfer stops being an act: copy a screenshot on your PC and paste it straight into a chat box on your phone. You confirm a device once; after that, Privli disappears from the workflow. More media (QR code, NFC, USB) and more capabilities (screen sharing, keyboard and mouse, a CLI) are on the roadmap.
An open local layer
Our direction is to publish the local-interconnect layer openly — protocol documentation and a minimal open-source embedded reference implementation, so devices from laptops down to microcontrollers can join. Infrastructure must outgrow any single app, including ours.
A privacy promise is only worth what you can check. Verify our claims yourself