AirDrop between iPhones and Linux devices whose Wi-Fi isn't Apple's Broadcom chip.

See supported hardware.

# Install Omdrop:
omarchy plugin add https://github.com/netmojo-systems/omdrop-plugin.git

# Install Owly (omdrop-owl):
yay -S omdrop-owl

yay -S owly

inputs.owly.url = "github:t4t5/owly";

imports = [ inputs.owly.nixosModules.default ];
services.owly.enable = true;
services.owly.settings = { allow_untested = true; };

sudo apt install ./owly_*_amd64.deb     # Debian 12, Ubuntu 22.04 and newer

sudo dnf install ./owly-*.x86_64.rpm    # Fedora 44 and newer

cargo build --release --locked -p owlyd -p owly-cli
sudo packaging/install.sh owly
sudo systemctl daemon-reload && sudo nmcli general reload conf

Start the radio in your terminal:

owly radio up

Then, in another terminal:

# To receive files:
owly receive --dir ~/Downloads

# To send files:
owly browse    # (find nearby AirDrop receivers)
owly send --to "Jane's iPhone" photo.jpg

Make sure you set your phone's Airdrop setting to "Everyone for 10 minutes".

Status: ✅ both directions work, ⚠️ unreliable (see known issues), ❌ fails, ❓ untested

Modes: Shared keeps Wi-Fi connected; Exclusive and Active monitor turn it off while the radio is up (see why?)

One card name can cover chips that behave differently, so a report from a machine, PCI ID (lspci -nn) or kernel not listed here helps too.

owly doctor

This says which mode the card runs in, what's in the way (an AP on the wrong channel, a missing hostapd), and what's known to go wrong on it.

owly test-card

This walks you through a photo each way with an iPhone, watches Wi-Fi for five minutes, and writes a JSON report. Open a pull request adding it to hardware/reports/, or attach it to an issue.

A card with no entry in drivers.toml gets the * entry, which runs only with allow_untested = true. Cards that can inject frames from a monitor interface while connected to Wi-Fi are the likely candidates for shared mode. Most mac80211 drivers can, but how they behave around it varies, which is what drivers.toml records. To try other settings, copy the * entry to /etc/owly/drivers.toml under your driver's name (basename $(readlink /sys/class/net/<wifi>/device/driver)) and change it there.

owlyd reads /etc/owly/radio.toml and /etc/owly/drivers.toml again for each owly doctor and each time the radio comes up, so changes to them need no restart.

Shared. Wi-Fi stays connected, and AWDL shares the AP's channel, which has to be 6, 44 or 149. Owly injects frames through a monitor interface with the station's MAC, and advertises only the phone's slots on that channel. The station ACKs the phone's frames.

Exclusive. For cards that can't inject while connected, such as every Intel card tested. Wi-Fi is down while the radio is up, and comes back when it's given back. An ad-hoc cell on AWDL's BSSID takes the station's place to ACK the phone's frames, or a hidden AP (hostapd) on cards with no ad-hoc mode. It tries channels 44, 149 and 6 in that order, of those the card may transmit on, since an iPhone gives AWDL more slots on 5 GHz. Intel cards go straight to 6, the only channel where a phone has used their cell.

Active monitor. For cards with neither, such as the MediaTek MT7612U and MT7921: an active monitor carrying the station's MAC ACKs in place of the cell.

A USB adapter can run exclusive mode as a second card while the built-in one stays connected: set station to the adapter in /etc/owly/radio.toml and disconnect it (nmcli device disconnect <adapter>).

/etc/owly/radio.toml, all optional:

station = "wlan0"        # the Wi-Fi interface to use; else the first station
allow_untested = false   # run on a card the quirks table doesn't mark tested
reconnect_after = true   # overrides the driver's reconnect_after_monitor
country = "DE"           # exclusive modes: the regulatory domain to ask for
channels = [6]           # exclusive modes: overrides the driver's channel order
aggregation = true       # overrides the driver's rx_ampdu: accept the phone's Block Ack session
tx_rate = "mcs7"         # the data frame rate
hostapd = "/usr/sbin/hostapd" # for a hidden AP, on cards with no ad-hoc mode; else found on PATH
tx_amsdu = true          # send unicast as A-MSDUs where the peer takes them

What Owly does on each Wi-Fi driver comes from crates/owly-radio/drivers.toml. /etc/owly/drivers.toml, in the same format, is read over it, so you can try settings for a new card without rebuilding.

owly doctor lists what's known to go wrong on your card. Beyond that:

• Shared mode needs your AP on channel 6, 44 or 149. On any other channel, the radio won't come up, and owly doctor says so.
• The firewall can block the receiver, so the phone never sees this computer. Allow TCP 8771 on awdl0 (Omdrop: omdrop firewall install).
• The iPhone can stop answering. If this computer stops showing up in the iPhone's share sheet, or transfers stay on "Waiting", restart the iPhone.
• Exclusive mode is slow on channel 6, where Intel cards and others that refuse a 5 GHz cell run, since AWDL there gets few of the iPhone's slots: a 2.4 MB photo takes 10–17 s on an AX201.

AirDrop runs over AWDL, a Wi-Fi link Apple devices use to talk to each other directly. Owly comes in two halves:

• owlyd, a small system service, takes over your Wi-Fi card, runs AWDL on it, and hands the resulting awdl0 network interface to the app that asked for it. When the app is done, or crashes, owlyd gives your Wi-Fi back.
• AirDrop itself (owly receive or Omdrop) runs as your user, not as root, and talks over awdl0 like any other network.

The pieces are Rust crates you can use in other projects: owly-awdl (AWDL), owly-airdrop (AirDrop) and owly-radio (the Wi-Fi card on Linux). docs/SPEC.md describes the protocol they implement. To add a new kind of radio, such as an ESP32 over USB, implement owly-awdl's Air trait if it only sends and receives Wi-Fi frames, or owly-radio's Backend trait if it runs AWDL itself.

To try it with a phone, run just radio in one terminal (it installs owlyd first when it's missing or out of date), then just receive or just send in another. With no arguments, just send sends a test photo, tests/photo.png.

The AirDrop tests run sender and receiver in a user network namespace (unshare -rn), so they need no root, but do need unprivileged user namespaces. just install installs a development build the way the packages lay it out, and just uninstall removes it. packaging/arch/*/PKGBUILD build packages from the checkout (makepkg -si there), and packaging/package.sh deb or rpm builds owly's .deb or .rpm.