In this short post, I’ll go into KDE Connect, which builds mini bridges between my Android phone and tablet, and my desktop Mac, although this did not take long to setup, it has become extremely useful in my day-to-day life!

Why?

When I used PushBullet, I really liked how I was able to send links between my devices and get notifications from my phone on my computer. However, I became disillusioned with it after they made changes a couple of years a go to the message limit, and looked into some alternatives.

For a while, I used Signal to just share things between devices with its “Note to Self” feature, and then I had Gotify fill this purpose. However, none of these supported more in-depth features, such as seeing notifications.

I’m not sure how I found KDE Connect, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I simply stumbled across it browsing the F-Droid app. It had even more features than PushBullet, such as sharing clipboard contents, finding mobile devices when I’ve misplaced them, seeing the battery life of my mobile devices, and be notified of incoming calls as a notification on my Mac.

I also installed KDE Connect on my tablet as a means to easily share passwords from my phone’s password manager, which isn’t installed on my tablet for safety reasons, and that alone has been worth this whole setup as typing out strong alphanumerical passwords with special characters was pretty time-consuming.

KDE Connect

I began by installing KDE Connect on the Android device via the F-Droid app, which also keeps it up to date, but it is also available on the Google Play Store. It’s quite a simple application to use, as it’s mostly just setting permissions and everything up once, and then letting it run in the background.

Soduto

When it came to first setting up this process, I used a MacOS application called Soduto, either because the corresponding KDE Connect application was not yet available, or I simply wasn’t aware of its existence, I can’t quite remember! Either way, I think Soduto was suggested to me via a Reddit post, and it did what I wanted it to do, and was generally satisfied with it, despite a lack of development in recent years.

Full KDE Connect

However, when reinstalling my MacOS last year, I saw that although KDE Connect runs best when connecting to a Linux machine, it can run with a few less features on Windows and MacOS, though significantly more than Soduto. For example, when linking KDE Connect together with Soduto, I get these two options on my phone:

1. Send files
2. Send clipboard

Whereas KDE Connect running on both devices has these options:

1. Send Files
2. Send clipboard
3. Presentation mode
4. Multimedia control
5. Remote input
6. Run Command

While I have no need for Presentation Mode, being able to use my phone as a mouse and directly enter keystrokes by Remote Input, and control media and volume with Multimedia Control, have proved extremely useful. While I have yet to experiment fully with Run Command, it seems it would be pretty powerful when configured.

Conclusion

I often hear people talk positively about iOS and Mac devices connecting pretty fluidly between each other, and although KDE Connect may not be able to recreate that seamless process, I think when it comes to some functions, people on Linux, Windows and Android devices ought to give this a go. KDE Connect is free, easy to install, and aside from a few minutes initially approving various permissions on all the linked devices, is simple to use and pretty much a set-and-forget system.