# A "Linux Laptop" pops up in the iPhone share sheet: a 12-second video, a TODO left untouched for seven years. 29 days, 3,287 stars · GitHub open source

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> On Oct 9 the author posted a 12-second real-device video on X: an iPhone share sheet showing a Linux laptop as a target, with Wi-Fi still connected after the transfer. It got 790k views and +1,044 stars in two days. It shipped the step that had sat in the old project's TODO for 2019 years, right as Google's AirDrop interop news and Omarchy …

[GitHub open-source project](https://stringers.io/en/github/index.md) · written 11-6

t4t5/owly · t4t5

# A "Linux Laptop" pops up in the iPhone share sheet: a 12-second video, a TODO left untouched for seven years. 29 days, 3,287 stars

**What it is** An open-source tool written in Rust that lets an ordinary Linux laptop, using its built-in MediaTek, Realtek, or Intel Wi-Fi card, send files to and from an iPhone. The iPhone side uses the system AirDrop, so no app to install.

**Why it took off** The author, Oct 9, posted a 12-second real-device video on X. It shows a Linux laptop appearing in the iPhone share sheet, with Wi-Fi still connected after the transfer. It got 790k views and gained 1,044 stars in a single day over two days. The step had sat in an old project's TODO for 2019 years, and it landed right as Google's AirDrop interoperability news and the Omarchy community were buzzing.

**C** **How you can follow suit** Stop building AirDrop for non-Apple devices. Copy the playbook instead: find an unfinished step in the "known limitations" of an abandoned project, pick a moment where a big company's walled garden gets breached, cut it into a 15-second real-device video for X, launch in an active community, then turn device compatibility testing into a single command plus a PR.

C grade: the playbook is worth learning, but the topic is already widely covered. The Linux slot is taken, and Windows has been claimed by more than a dozen libraries since Owly, including by the original author. The bar is also drivers and reverse engineering, so followers can't easily reproduce the same visual. Publicly known / widely discussed

Data (updated daily) · Repo created 2026-10-08 · 3,301 stars · 7 days +81

GitHub · stars

Data 2026-10-10 → 2026-11-08 (30 days, 30 observations). Points before 10-28 come from deeply / archive backfill, not every day has one

Owly lets an ordinary Linux laptop appear in the iPhone's AirDrop using its built-in Wi-Fi card, with nothing to install on the phone. A real-device video with 790k views drove an overnight surge, and a community adding Wi-Fi card test results one by one kept it going long-term. The visual came at the very end of a seven-year relay, and the topic is already crowded. What's worth learning is how it chose the topic, how it launched, and how it got users to do the work for it.

### A 12-second video

On Oct 2026 9, at 1 p.m., Tristan (on GitHub as t4t5) posted on X: "airdrop fully reverse-engineered! works flawlessly on my framework laptop," with a 12-second video. The video shows an iPhone opening its share sheet and selecting a machine called "Linux Laptop." A photo lands in the Downloads folder of a Framework 13 laptop running DHH's Omarchy distro. The receive prompt looks just like it does on a Mac, and Wi-Fi never drops.

By Nov 6 the post had 792k views, 16k likes, 5,800 bookmarks, and 1,000 reposts. The repo link he dropped in a reply had 59k views on its own. He only has 13.9k followers, so the reach came from tech circles passing it along. The most interesting reply came from tech analyst Max Weinbach: "Been around for 7 years now!", linking to OpenDrop from 2019 years ago. The "it's been around forever" comment didn't cool the hype. It sent more people to look and compare.

Stars followed the same curve. The repo was created Oct 8. By Oct 9, when someone else logged it, it had 416 stars. By Oct 10 it had 954 stars. Oct 11 added 1,044 in a single day, and Oct 13 reached 2,390. It then dropped quickly to around twenty or thirty a day. By Nov 6 it had 3,287 stars and 255 forks, and over the last 7 days it gained 156 (GitHub daily records). It never hit Hacker News, and no paid promotion was visible.

### What it actually built

Underneath AirDrop is Apple's private wireless protocol, AWDL. In 2018, a team at TU Darmstadt published a paper that openly dissected it, and in 2019 they released the open-source implementations OWL and OpenDrop. That got 813 points on HN at the time. But that stack required an external decade-old Atheros card, and Wi-Fi dropped as soon as you started. OWL's README spelled out the fix under "current limitations": create a monitor interface and put the router's channel into AWDL's channel sequence. Seven years passed with no one finishing it.

A relay of three people came after that:

| Timeline | Who | How far along |
|---|---|---|
| 2019-05 | seemoo-lab's OWL / OpenDrop | Protocol public, needs an external card, Wi-Fi drops during transfer |
| 2026-07-31 | jedbillyb's airdrop-mt7921 | First bidirectional run on the laptop's built-in MediaTek card, but only 40–67 kB/s and Wi-Fi drops during transfer; now at 18 stars |
| 2026-09 | Brent Kearney's omdrop | Borrows the AWDL built into Apple's Broadcom firmware; only works on M1/M2 Macs running Linux, but has a polished tray UI |
| 2026-10-08 | t4t5's omdrop-owl (later renamed Owly) | Ordinary x86 laptop; keeps AWDL on the router's same channel so Wi-Fi stays connected, receiving at about 1.3 MB/s |

It's an order of magnitude faster than the July version (per the comparison on frontiernow.dev 10-10). The UI reuses omdrop's existing one, so you can shoot that "just like a Mac" video on day one.

### Why it grabbed attention

**The visual goes against intuition.** AirDrop is the symbol of Apple's walled garden, and "a Linux laptop shows up in the iPhone share sheet" makes sense instantly, no protocol explanation needed. That suits a ten-second video.

**It hit the news cycle.** In November 2025, Google made Pixel 10 Quick Share work with AirDrop. In February 2026 it expanded to more devices. "AirDrop no longer belongs only to Apple" had become a public topic, yet PCs and Linux still had no seat at the table. Meanwhile Omarchy and Framework were the hottest Linux desktop pairing among developers this year, and that audience overlaps almost entirely with the tech crowd on X.

**The author had the chops.** He created SweetAlert (22k stars) and knows how to tell a story. The phrase "fully reverse-engineered" was called out by the Chinese site aicoder as an overstatement, since the protocol had been cracked seven years earlier by others, but it worked well for distribution.

**He kept shipping right after launch.** In the 3 week he released 7 versions. 10-12 shipped v0.1.0, adding Debian packages and a Wi-Fi card test script. 10-14 added Nix. 10-21 rewrote everything in Rust and renamed it Owly, no longer tied to Omarchy. It now installs from AUR, NixOS, .deb, .rpm, and openSUSE. A second wave of coverage (Dutch Tweakers, French iPhoneSoft, Chinese niche software sites, Russian-language sites) followed between 10-11 and 10-13, catching the momentum right on time.

### The long tail rests on a table of Wi-Fi cards

The biggest question for projects like this is "will my Wi-Fi card work?" The author didn't test every card himself. He turned it into a community task: run `owly test-card` to generate a report, open a PR, and your hardware gets added to the README table. At launch the table had only his own MT7925 row. By Nov 6 it had 29 rows: 18 cards work, 6 of them without dropping Wi-Fi; Intel's AX200, AX210, AX211, and BE200 all work, but Wi-Fi drops during transfer; 3 are unstable and 8 fail. Every row lists model, PCI ID, distro, and kernel version. Of the 60 merged PRs, the author himself accounts for only 9. Most are test reports like this (GitHub API, 11-06). On the day v0.4.2 shipped in Oct 31, stars rose by 79. I haven't verified the cause; my guess is it's tied to the new release being reshared.

The hard limits are also spelled out in the README: the router must be on channel 6, 44, or 149; the iPhone must be set to "Everyone (10 minutes)"; and since the protocol is reverse-engineered, every time Apple changes the handshake someone has to chase it.

### Who is competing for the same spot

| Name | Scale (GitHub, 11-06) | How it differs |
|---|---|---|
| LocalSend | 97,427 stars | Both sides need an app installed; Owly's selling point is zero install on the iPhone side |
| PairDrop / Snapdrop | About 11k stars each | Transfers in the browser, both sides open a web page, not real AirDrop |
| seemoo-lab/OpenDrop | 9,938 stars | The original protocol implementation; needs an external card, largely unmaintained for 2021 years |
| omdrop-plugin | 213 stars | Only works on Apple Silicon Macs running Linux |
| t2-drop + kernel patch | 102 stars | Only Intel Macs with a T2 chip are covered, 11-04 just submitted for kernel review |

Linux is already taken by Owly. The obvious next gap is Windows, and since Oct 9 more than a dozen libraries have appeared: omdrop-owl-windows (32 stars), which uses an ESP15 board as an external radio; Wayline (22 stars); winawdl, which uses native Realtek drivers; gsl0001/windows-airdrop (71 stars); plus AirFlick Drop, which hit HN in Nov 1. Owly's own issue #27 is also discussing an ESP32-based Windows backend. None have taken off yet.

### If it were you

**The takeaway:** Stop building yet another "AirDrop for non-Apple devices." Linux is taken, Windows already has over a dozen people in it, and the original author is heading that way too. The part worth copying is the playbook: find a moment where a big company's walled garden gets breached, finish the step that an old project's README mentions but nobody completed, and shoot it as a real-device video under 15 seconds for X.

**Who it fits:** systems-level developers who understand drivers, network protocols, or reverse engineering, and who have a popular piece of hardware to work with (Framework, Steam Deck, a popular router or phone). People who already have some developer following on X.

**Who it doesn't fit:** people who only write application code and want to ship in a few days. One driver issue can eat a week on this kind of project. People who want to make money from it: this is a reputation business. People unwilling to keep chasing Apple's updates: one protocol change means starting over.

**How to do it:**

1. Look through reverse-engineering or interoperability projects that have been abandoned for years but still have a decent star count (OpenDrop is one). Read their "Current Limitations" and TODO sections. Many of the solutions are already written down. What's missing is someone finishing the job and packaging it.

2. Pick a visual you can understand at a glance: Apple's relay, a universal clipboard, AirDrop to a TV, iMessage, the Find My network, CarPlay running on non-Apple devices, or a closed device controlled from an ordinary computer.

3. Launch in an active community that overlaps with the people spreading the news (here, Omarchy + Framework). Borrow an existing interface to make the visual look polished first, then rename and generalize once it takes off.

4. In the first week, get install packages out to the major distros, and turn "will my device work?" into a single command plus a PR template.

**How to get users:** post the video on X, one line of text, no explanation of the mechanics, filmed on a real device, with the repo link in a reply. Don't count on Hacker News; this one had zero posts there. Once it takes off, tech sites in Chinese, Dutch, and French will write about it on their own. Your job is to ship a second version within three days so they have something new to write about.

**When it's timely:** the wave of "Apple interoperability" talk sparked by Quick Share's AirDrop support is still going, and news about the EU forcing Apple to open up could reignite it at any time (my inference). Topics operate on a monthly clock. Once someone else films the same visual first, the window closes.

**Signs you misread it:** if the video gets only a few tens of thousands of views in a week and stars stall in the three digits, the visual wasn't counterintuitive enough, or someone already did it better. Or Apple changes the handshake in the next iOS release and your demo breaks overnight.

[GitHub repo ↗](https://github.com/t4t5/owly)

**Research notes: competitor table, acquisition evidence, full research report**

Competitors

| Name | Where | Launched | Scale | How it differs from this one |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| seemoo-lab OpenDrop + OWL | Open source | 2019-05 | 9,938 / 1,573 stars | The original reverse engineering. Required an external Atheros card, and Wi-Fi had to drop. Largely unmaintained for 2021 years. Owly was built on top of it, solving built-in cards, Wi-Fi staying connected, and packaging. |
| jedbillyb/airdrop-mt7921 | Open source | 2026-07-31 | 18 stars | The first version to run bidirectionally on a built-in MediaTek card, but only at 40–67 kB/s with Wi-Fi dropping. Owly reaches about 1.3 MB/s, and some cards keep Wi-Fi connected. |
| omdrop-plugin + omdrop-awdl(brentkearney/netmojo) | Open source | 2026-09-15 | 213 stars | Uses the AWDL in Apple Silicon Mac Broadcom firmware, only runs Linux on Macs. Owly started as its non-Broadcom backend, covering ordinary PCs. |
| kaiT2en t2-drop + brcmfmac AWDL kernel patch | Open source | 2026-11-04 | 102 stars | Covers only the Broadcom chips in T2 Intel Macs |
| LocalSend | Open source | 2022-12 | 97,427 stars | Both ends need an app and work over the local network. Owly's iPhone side requires zero install and uses the system AirDrop. |
| PairDrop / Snapdrop / ShareDrop | Web | 2014–2023 | ~11k stars | Browser WebRTC; both ends open a web page, not real AirDrop |
| FlyingCarpet | Open source | 2017-07 | 5,377 stars | Self-built ad hoc Wi-Fi; both ends install an app |
| Google Quick Share × AirDrop | Big-company features | 2025-11 (Pixel 10), 2026-02 extension | Pixel 9/10 and other Android phones | Android phones only, no Linux/PC; but it proved demand and rode the hot topic |

Where users come from

- **Verified** **Author's X demo video** : 2026-10-09 @t4t5 13-second video, 791.5K views, 16K likes, 5.8K bookmarks, 1K reposts; author has only 13.9k followers; 10-10~10-13 stars gained ~2,200

- **Verified** **Tech media and repost accounts** : aicoder (10-09), frontiernow long-form (10-10), appinn niche-software (10-11), Tweakers/iPhoneSoft (10-13), vocus (10-29); LinkedIn, Instagram reels, YouTube explainers, Telegram github_repos

- **Verified** **Omarchy / Framework community** : launched as the backend of the Omarchy plugin omdrop (PR #25); omarchyarchive.com archived it the same day; AUR omdrop-owl-bin

- **Verified** **Packaged across many distros** : AUR, NixOS flake, .deb, .rpm, openSUSE OBS community packaging

- **Verified** **Community hardware-test PRs** : owly doctor / test-card generate reports to submit as PRs; the hardware table grew from 1 rows to 30 cards; 60 closed PRs, the author made only 9

- Inferred **Hacker News** : the hackernews library has no owly/omdrop-owl stories, so it did not go through HN

## t4t5/owly: AirDrop on non-Apple Wi-Fi cards, and why it took off

> Channel: GitHub. Research date: 2026-11-06. Data sources: our github / hackernews libraries (agent-im server), GitHub API, Jina/Exa web search and page extraction.

### One line

Owly (originally omdrop-owl, library created 2026-10-08, later renamed) is a Linux user-space AWDL + AirDrop implementation written in Rust. An ordinary x86 laptop using its built-in MediaTek / Realtek / Intel Wi-Fi card, with no app installed, can appear in the iPhone share sheet and transfer files both ways. It took off overnight thanks to the author's 790k-view 13-second demo video, with stars reaching 29 in 3,287 days.

### 1. Data

- Star curve (github library repo_day): 10-10 152 → 10-11 1,196 (+1,044 in one day) → 10-12 1,958 (+762) → 10-13 2,390 (+432) → after 10-14 it quickly fell back to 20–50 per day → 11-06 3,287. Over the last 7 days +156, over the previous 7 days +169; this is the long tail after the peak. On 10-31 there was a small +79 jump, with v0.4.2 released the same day (GitHub releases); cause unverified.

- Note: when aicoder.com was scraped, it had 416 stars for 10-09; frontiernow.dev had 954 stars for 10-10. In our database, the 152 on the 10-10 row likely reflects a lagging source, and the real breakout happened between 10-09 and 10-12.

- 255 forks, 114 commits, 7 releases (v0.1.0 10-12 → v0.4.2 10-31), 60 closed PRs, of which the author made 9; the rest came from community contributors such as FerdinaKusumah, MrSco, plusky and benthecarman (GitHub API), many of them Wi-Fi card test reports.

- Never on HN: no HackerNews stories in the database for owly / omdrop-owl. For comparison: LocalSend hit HN with 2026-04-28 points 923; OpenDrop hit HN in 2019 with 813 points.

- The card says it "hit #10 on all of GitHub trending": it did not appear on our trending data (trending only tracks repos with about 60 days of history). This source is unverified and may be Trendshift or a third-party chart.

### II. Competitors

| Product | Form | Launched | Scale | How Owly differs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| seemoo-lab/OpenDrop + OWL | Open source (Python / C) | 2019-05 | 9,938 / 1,573 stars | Original protocol reverse engineering (TU Darmstadt, MobiCom 2018 paper); requires an external Atheros card and Wi-Fi must be dropped; OpenDrop has been largely unmaintained since 2021, and its author says it "hasn't worked for years". Owly builds directly on top of them. |
| jedbillyb/airdrop-mt7921 | Open source | 2026-07-31 | 18 stars | First ran both ways on a laptop's built-in MediaTek card, but only at 40–67 kB/s and dropping the network during transfers; Owly reuses its monitor-interface idea and pins AWDL to the AP's channel, achieving no network drop and ~1.3 MB/s |
| brentkearney(netmojo-systems)/omdrop-plugin + omdrop-awdl | Open source, Omarchy plugin | 2026-09-13/15 | 213 stars | Uses the AWDL built into Broadcom firmware on Apple Silicon Macs, so it runs only on M1/M2 Macs under Asahi/Omarchy. Owly started as its "non-Broadcom backend" and shares its tray UI. |
| kaiT2en t2-drop + brcmfmac AWDL kernel patch | Open source | 2026-11-04 submitted for kernel review | 102 stars (KaiT2en-Fedora) | Covers only the Broadcom chips in T2 Intel Macs (Phoronix 2026-11-05) |
| LocalSend | Open-source cross-platform app | 2022-12 | 97,427 stars | Both ends must install an app and go over the LAN; Owly's selling point is that the iPhone side installs nothing and uses the built-in share sheet |
| PairDrop / Snapdrop / ShareDrop | Web | 2014–2023 | 11.7k / 10.7k stars | Browser WebRTC; both ends must open a web page |
| FlyingCarpet | Open source | 2017 | 5,377 stars | Self-built ad hoc Wi-Fi; both ends install an app |
| Google Quick Share × AirDrop | Big-company features | 2025-11 (Pixel 10), 2026-02 expanded to Pixel 9 and others | big tech | Android phones only; proved that direct AirDrop from non-Apple devices is feasible and legal and heated up demand, but did not cover PC/Linux |

Verdict: the same thing (native AirDrop on Linux, zero install on the iPhone side) had been attempted before, but either needed special hardware, only worked on Macs, or was too slow to be usable. Owly is the first version where an ordinary PC laptop with its built-in card stays connected and the speed is usable.

### 3. Growth tactics

1. **Author's X demo video (confirmed)** : 2026-10-09 13:02, @t4t5: "airdrop fully reverse-engineered! works flawlessly on my framework laptop", 13-second video, 792k views, 16k likes, 5.8K bookmarks, 1K reposts; a reply linking the repo got 59k views (x.com post text, fetched via r.jina.ai). The author has 13.9k X followers, far fewer than the reach of this post, which suggests big tech accounts amplified it. Max Weinbach's reply "this has existed for 7 years" (referring to OpenDrop) added to the discussion.

2. **Media re-spread (confirmed)** : 10-09~10-13 aicoder.com, frontiernow.dev (long-form "seven years in the making"), Tweakers (Dutch), iPhoneSoft (French), technobrother (Russian), the Chinese niche-software site appinn, toolhubdaily, besthub, plus 10-29 vocus; LinkedIn "Evolving AI" and other repost accounts; multiple Instagram reels (including traffic accounts using "comment airdrop and I'll send you the link"), YouTube explainer shorts, and Telegram github_repos channel (Exa / Jina search results).

3. **Omarchy community (confirmed)** : it launched right inside DHH's Omarchy distro ecosystem (omdrop plugin PR #25, Omarchy plugin marketplace); omarchyarchive.com archived it the same day. Framework 13 + Omarchy is exactly the scene in this tweet. Omarchy has been a hot 2026-year Linux desktop community whose users overlap heavily with the developer crowd on X.

4. **Multi-distro packaging lowers the barrier to trying it (confirmed)** : AUR (owly, omdrop-owl-bin), NixOS flake, .deb, .rpm, openSUSE OBS (home:pluskalm:owly, community packaging).

5. **Turning "can my card work?" into a community task (confirmed)** : `owly doctor` and `owly test-card` generate JSON reports, encouraging PRs that add to the hardware table. At launch the table had only one MT7925 row; it has grown to 30 cards (Intel AX200/AX201/AX210/AX211/BE200, several Realtek cards now working in Exclusive mode). This keeps long-tail stars and PRs coming in.

6. **No HN (confirmed absent)** , and no sign of paid promotion.

### 4. Why it made the list

- **The demo is the hook itself** : the image of "Linux Laptop appearing in the iPhone share sheet" is instantly understood and counterintuitive (AirDrop symbolizes Apple's walled garden), perfect for short-video spread; 790k views led to roughly 10-10~10-13 2,200 stars.

- **Finished the step nobody had completed in the public TODOs for seven years** : the OWL README said 2019 years ago that creating a monitor interface and putting the AP channel into the AWDL channel sequence would fix the network drop, but nobody did it. Owly did: on MT7925 the network stays up at ~1.3 MB/s, an order of magnitude faster than July's airdrop-mt7921 (frontiernow.dev).

- **Timing** : Google 2025-11 made Pixel's Quick Share compatible with AirDrop, 2026-02 expanding it to more devices, so "AirDrop isn't Apple-only anymore" is already public talk. At the same time, 2026 Linux desktops (Omarchy, Framework) are hot among developers, and September omdrop just shipped a polished UI on Mac. Owly is the last leg of this relay, and it grabbed most of the attention.

- **The author has credibility** : Tristan / t4t5 is the author of SweetAlert (22,238 stars), has a following in the developer circle on X, and tells a good story (the "fully reverse-engineered" phrasing was called an overstatement by aicoder, but it spread effectively).

- **Fast iteration after launch** : 3 weeks and 7 releases, renamed to owly to break the Omarchy tie, rewritten from the Python/OWL combination into Rust crates (owly-awdl, owly-airdrop), extended to Intel cards, catching a second wave of attention.

### 5. Differentiation

- Compared with AirDrop alternatives like LocalSend / PairDrop: zero install on iPhone, straight from the system share sheet. This is what users actually want, and it addresses the weakness LocalSend's HN discussion pointed out ("AirDrop's USP is ad hoc sharing with strangers").

- Compared with OpenDrop / OWL / airdrop-mt7921: no external card needed, some cards stay connected, speed is usable, and it installs as a single package.

- Compared with omdrop-awdl / t2-drop: not limited to Apple hardware; ordinary PCs can use it.

- This differentiation is why it took off: the demo video showed exactly "ordinary laptop + native share sheet + network stays up".

- Weak points: relies on the card's occasional ability to inject frames while connected to an AP; Intel cards only work in exclusive mode (network drops during transfer); the AP must be on channel 6/44/149; the iPhone must be set to "Everyone for 10 minutes"; the protocol is reverse engineered, so every Apple change means a chase.

### 6. Visibility and copycats

- **Already widely discussed** : ~790k X views, coverage from tech media in multiple countries, Instagram / YouTube repost accounts, and the Chinese-language sphere (appinn, vocus, xabcnews) has already written about it. It is not "nobody knows about it".

- **Plenty of copycats (GitHub API, built after 10-09)** : dantdmdarealguy/omdrop-owl-windows (ESP32 as AWDL radio, 15 stars), ZyphrZero/Wayline (Windows + ESP32,22 stars), raph559/winawdl (native Windows RTL8852CE), gsl0001/windows-airdrop (71 stars), digitaldanis/multidrop, kmod-midori/owl_rs, BenItBuhner/AirDrop-for-Everything, Kratospidey/dms-airdrop, Dy1an-Zou/Airdrop-for-Windows, parsakhaz/open-airdrop-windows, kimsherry/airdrop-linux, Arxusion/AirportMtk-AWDL (macOS hackintosh driver), bydash-xyz/omclip (universal clipboard); HN 11-01 "AirFlick Drop – AirDrop for Windows". Owly's own issue #27 is also discussing an ESP32 Windows backend. The next empty slot is clearly Windows, and a crowd has already piled in, but none of them has taken off.

### VII. What to take away

- For "break the walled garden" open-source projects, the best launch asset is a 15-second real-device video that makes the idea obvious at a glance, posted on X rather than HN.

- Check old project READMEs under "Current Limitations / TODO": many bottlenecks already have a known fix written down; what's missing is someone building it and shipping it.

- Turn compatibility testing into a one-click script plus a PR flow, so users' "will this work on my machine?" becomes a contribution. The long tail follows.

- Launch by attaching to a hot ecosystem whose users overlap with the audience (here, Omarchy + Framework), then generalize the name later.

### 8. Not sure

- The source for "#10 on all of GitHub" is unverified.

- The source of the +10-31 / +79 bumps is unverified (same-day v0.4.2; may be reposted videos or Chinese coverage).

- Actual install numbers are unknown; how many of the stars are "watching" rather than "using" is unknown. Whether DHH himself reshared it: no evidence found.

- Whether Apple will change the AWDL / AirDrop handshake in later iOS versions and break these tools is unknown.

### Sources

- [github.com/t4t5/owly](https://github.com/t4t5/owly) (README, releases, PR list, GitHub API 2026-11-06)

- [x.com/t4t5/status/2108543714318582247](https://x.com/t4t5/status/2108543714318582247) (views, likes, bookmarks)

- [frontiernow.dev/en/resources/articles/airdrop-linux-relay/](https://frontiernow.dev/en/resources/articles/airdrop-linux-relay/) (2026-10-10)

- [aicoder.com/news/news-20261009-omdrop-owl-airdrop-linux-fram…](https://aicoder.com/news/news-20261009-omdrop-owl-airdrop-linux-framework-mt7925) (2026-10-09)

- [tweakers.net/nieuws/253240/](https://tweakers.net/nieuws/253240/) (2026-10-13)

- [www.appinn.com/omdrop-owl/](https://www.appinn.com/omdrop-owl/) (2026-10-11), [iphonesoft.fr/2026/10/13/airdrop-fonctionne-linux-projet-ope…](https://iphonesoft.fr/2026/10/13/airdrop-fonctionne-linux-projet-open-source)

- [www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Kernel-Apple-AirDrop-Code](https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Kernel-Apple-AirDrop-Code) (2026-11-05)

- [blog.google/products-and-platforms/platforms/android/quick-s…](https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/platforms/android/quick-share-airdrop/), [www.macrumors.com/2026/02/11/airdrop-quick-share-interoperab…](https://www.macrumors.com/2026/02/11/airdrop-quick-share-interoperability-more-phones/)

- Our github library repo_profile / repo_day (2026-11-06); hackernews library story (2026-11-06)

This article was written by AI from public data and the data we collect daily. Numbers are sourced, and inferences are labeled.