Xiaomi, Oppo, and Vivo have teamed together to announce a cross-brand direct file transfer alliance. With this move, the three Chinese smartphones companies are looking to offer an alternative to Apple’s own AirDrop.

This alliance will allow users of Xiaomi, Oppo, and Vivo to transfer files directly from their devices with each other without the use of a third-party app with a maximum speed of up to 20MBps. This new file transfer will support the transfer of photos, videos, songs, documents, and other media files.

It is surprising to see Xiaomi, Oppo, and Vivo team up to offer a cross-brand file transfer alliance. Together, these companies account for more than 40% of smartphone sales in China. The only notable company missing from this alliance is Huawei which accounts for another 40%+ of the smartphone market share in China. The company does have its own Huawei Share protocol but it would have been more convenient for users if all these four Chinese smartphones worked together on a file transfer protocol.

The new cross-brand file transfer feature from Xiaomi, Oppo, and Vivo is expected to make its public debut by the end of this month. It is likely that we will see these three companies roll out a software update for their older and popular devices to add this new file transfer feature to it.

What is disappointing to see is that despite Apple offering something like AirDrop on iPhones for years, Google has not added any similar feature to Android yet. Over the years, we saw many Android OEMs launch a feature similar to AirDrop but it failed to take off because of the lack of compatibility with other Android OEMs.