Receiver-initiated file sharing

Question

I don't have an iPhone, and recently I was in a situation where somebody wanted to airdrop a file to me, but my phone couldn't accept it. I had to tediously explain why this couldn't work, and the transfer took a very long time. This got me thinking about general purpose file sharing, and I realized that I needed a reliable way for someone to give me a file, with no requirements on their end except an Internet connection and a browser. Essentially, I'm wondering if anyone knows of a web service that would allow me to do something similar to the following:

• Send somebody a link.
• That person then follows it, and the page allows them to upload a file to my account, and perhaps shows a message about what file I'm expecting
• I get an email/notification/alert to accept or decline, and the file is then given to me by a share link, download, or is ideally put directly into a folder of my OneDrive, Google Drive, or Dropbox.

My main motivation is that a disturbingly large number of people don't know how to upload and share a file, so I would like to make the process of sharing a file with me as quick and painless as possible.

Answer 1

The program woof does something like this, although I've only used it on my desktop. On Android, you could probably run that in Termux or a similar app.

You run woof -U in a terminal and it'll give you a URL someone can type in their browser to get an upload page.

Keep in mind, the URL is usually a private IP address, so it's not memorable and will require you to be on the same Wifi network.

Answer 2

Nextcloud has this feature, just take a look at their documentation, Allow public uploads is what you want.

Answer 3

send.firefox.com is the most simple option for files under 1GB.

You could use a free service like Google Drive, but you are right it could be more simple.

Uploading to Someone Else's Google Drive

You could run your own web server with a simple 20 line upload page, but upload is slow on some connections.

You could use your Android phone as a web server but that's only useful if you are on the same WiFi.

Emailing someone a link to your personal web server upload page is the best solution most of the time, and it optionally gives you an excuse to learn about SBCs, Linux, PHP.