How to Send Files From Android to iPhone & Vice Versa

By Ashley Poland

Updated September 13, 2017

File sharing apps work on both phones and tablets.
i George Frey/Getty Images News/Getty Images

While some people maintain strict party lines in their mobile lives, most homes and offices end up with a collection of both iOS and Android devices. If you need to transfer files between your Android device and an iPhone, you can either take advantage of network connectivity to share files, or use specialized apps for sharing the information.

Email

Chances are that both your Android device and your iPhone are set up to receive email, even if it's the same account on both devices. If the file you want to send between devices isn't too large – such as audio files, office documents or photos – you can use email to send it between devices. You can give each device a unique email address, or send the file to yourself, from yourself, to maintain a copy of the document in your inbox.

Cloud Storage

If you want to keep files synced between both an iPhone and an Android device, choose a cloud backup solution that has apps for both Android and iOS. While Dropbox is one of the more well-known multi-platform cloud storage applications, both Google Drive and Box also offer apps that sync to both Android and iOS devices. To move a file from one device to the other, simply upload it to your cloud account using one phone and retrieve it from the same account using another phone.

Transfer Applications

If you have both the iPhone and the Android device on a common Wi-Fi network, you can use that common connection to send files between the devices directly. Several apps allow you to create a network for transferring files, including Bluetooth File Transfer, Fast File Transfer and Sharable. Sharable must be installed on every device, and also shares files to computers as well. Similarly, Bump allows you to send files between not only two phones, but also phones and computers. You can also use Fast File Transfer, which installs on the Android device and creates a network connection in which you can transfer files both to and from the Android device to an iOS device.

Choosing a Method

Different applications serve different purposes. For archival purposes and for smaller files, email and cloud storage are more efficient, maintaining copies of the file that you can access from any device, not just your mobile devices. However, large video files will take a long time to download and use up storage space in either your inbox or cloud account. For large files, such as video and long audio recordings, transferring directly between devices will work better.

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