A developer built Quick Share from scratch for phones Google forgot, and it actually works

Bada gives the millions of Android devices locked out of Google's Quick Share a working file-sharing solution.

By Shikhar Mehrotra Published May 25, 2026

Electronics, Phone, Mobile Phone — Shikhar Mehrotra / Digital Trends

Google’s Quick Share is the kind of feature you don’t think about until the day you need it and your phone simply doesn’t have it. Huawei device owners live in that reality permanently, given that they don’t have access to Google Play services, and so does anyone running the Chinese regional build of Android.

However, a developer with the handle Kyujin-cho just published an open-source Android app called Bada on GitHub that seems to solve exactly this problem. It does so by implementing Google’s own Quick Share protocol from scratch, circumventing the lack of Google Play Services.

What does Bada actually do?

Once Bada is installed on a device that lacks Quick Share, it becomes fully interoperable with any Quick Share-equipped Android device nearby on the same Wi-Fi network. The same four-digit PIN confirmation process that users already know shows up on both the sending and receiving sides.

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Using the app, people can send files from any Android app (via the system share sheet), receive files to a specific folder, and even send entire folders, with the directory structure intact. Like Quick Share, the app supports Wi-Fi LAN as the transfer route, with BLE-based identification for devices running on stock Android and Samsung’s One UI.

Testing has already confirmed that Bada works with Galaxy S26 Ultra and Z Fold 7 over BLE GATT bootstrap. NearDrop on macOS and Quick Share on Windows are listed as targets; however, they remain untested.

Should you actually use it right now?

According to Android Authority’s hands-on testing, the app experience isn’t exactly seamless when sharing files from a Quick Share device to a Bada device. Windows transfers completely failed.

The project sits at 10 GitHub stars and one fork, which is still early-project territory by all means. The codebase is open-source, meaning anyone with the technical know-how can verify what it’s actually doing with their files.

The app itself confirms that transfers still use Quick Share’s encryption method. The developer explicitly targets interoperability with NearDrop and Windows Quick Share for the near future.

In my opinion, Bada won’t replace Quick Share for most people, but for Huawei users, along with the Chinese Android users Google quietly left behind, or for any other Android user whose phone doesn’t ship with Quick Share out of the box, it’s the closest thing to a real solution anyone has bothered to build.

Shikhar Mehrotra

News Writer

For more than five years, Shikhar has consistently simplified developments in the field of consumer tech and presented them…

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