![]() We have already unpublished the Portal Android app. We will be shutting down Portal on Friday, October 8th. Then, we needed to get the app running on mobile devices. Before too long, I was able to get it to a minimum viable product, so to speak. ![]() And it works pretty well (although I'll talk about some problems I had later). Since Chrome and Chromium variants have overwhelming browser dominance, this means Portal will soon no longer work for the vast majority of people. So of course, over a few nights and weekends I go and build the web app using Nuxt3. Since Portal worked by accessing a local server running on your phone to do all file transfers locally over WiFi, this means Portal no longer works for anyone using Chrome. Starting with Chrome 94, Chrome no longer allows HTTP requests to local IP addresses. Our philosophy of enabling apps to easily interact with files no longer fits the direction Android has taken. The same was true for playing video files, etc.Īndroid has since moved away from shared storage and all apps will be required to use Scoped Storage in just a couple months. ![]() Let’s say you had a game console emulator installed, you could use Portal to drop a bunch of ROMs onto your phone and the emulator was able to find them. This played very nicely with other apps, making interactions possible just like on a regular computer. We chose to have Portal put files into the shared storage on your phone so other apps could have access to the files after they were transferred. We are closing Portal because Google has made changes to both Android and Chrome that prevent Portal from working in the way we built it to work. Important: The Pushbullet app is not affected by this announcement. Unfortunately, over 6 years later, I’m now writing this post because many things have changed and the time has come to close Portal. We built the slickest app we could and have continued to support the app, site and server for over 6 years now. Portal was a passion project that we built to experiment with other ways of moving data between phones and computers.
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