AltSendme

Device-to-device transfers, now shipped as DashBeam

AltSendme has been called DashBeam since release 0.6.2 on 30 July 2026, and both the old GitHub repository and altsendme.com redirect to the new name. The app sends files and folders from one device to another without parking them on a server. The sender gets a ticket, a link or a QR code, and the receiver pastes it into the app or opens the link in a browser with nothing to install. It needs no account and, per its privacy policy, collects no telemetry.

Networking comes from Iroh, the peer-to-peer stack built by n0. Each device is addressed by an Ed25519 key, connections run over QUIC with TLS 1.3, and a relay carries the data while both peers try to punch a direct path through their NATs. The desktop and Android apps are Tauri 2 shells around a Rust transfer engine, with a React interface.

Resume from the last verified chunk, even after a network switch

• Resume without resending: every chunk is verified on its own against the root of a BLAKE3 tree, so after a dropped connection the receiver asks only for the chunks it lacks.
• Network changes mid-transfer: the connection follows the device key rather than its IP address. Moving from Wi-Fi to cellular does not end it.
• Paired devices: pair once, by code (remote works too) or through mDNS discovery on the LAN, and later sends need no ticket. Since 0.7.1, a device marked as trusted drops files without a prompt, into a folder named after it.
• sendme compatibility: hand-copied tickets and Iroh's sendme CLI work with the app, and sendme is what the downloads page hands out as the command-line version.
• Throughput reported in the README: 452 GB for the largest transfer and a 125 MB/s peak on a gigabit link.

Public relays by default, browser-only on iPhone

DashBeam pitches itself as the LocalSend alternative that works over the internet, since LocalSend stays on the local network, and as an open-source alternative to Blip, which is closed source. The README also asks why anyone would rely on WeTransfer, Dropbox or Google Drive. In its comparison table, the "catch" row for DashBeam holds one word: WIP.

Default relays are run by n0, the team behind Iroh. About one transfer in ten never gets a direct path (symmetric NAT, locked-down corporate networks) and stays on a relay from start to finish. The relay cannot read the files, but the privacy policy lists what it does see: IP addresses, timestamps, connection duration and the amount of data. For unthrottled remote transfers, the README points to self-hosting: the infra/ folder ships a relay and a discovery server for Docker Compose or Fly.io, and both devices must be set to the same ones.

The web version always goes through the public relays. The app says so on screen: no direct connections from the browser, throttled speeds, and no way to set a custom relay. With no iOS app yet (a first build has sat in a pull request since 23 October 2026), that browser is how an iPhone user receives files.

Incoming data goes through the system temp folder first. The privacy policy mentions it, and issue #294, opened in August 2026, shows the consequence on Windows: a transfer headed for drive D fails when drive C runs out of room. The maintainer replied that a fix would come, and the issue is still open.

Version 0.7.2, released on 14 October 2026, patches a security hole. A bug in iroh-blobs let any peer able to connect to a sharing device write into its store and fill its disk, though it could not alter files already there. The release notes ask users to update. It is the ninth stable release since 24 June, still on 0.x.