NectarLink

Your Android phone and your PC, working as one.

Notifications, messages, calls, clipboard, files, photos, screen mirroring and phone apps in windows, between Android and Windows 11. Free and open source. Local-first, end-to-end encrypted, no account and no cloud.

Hi, I'm Bee, and yes, a bee built an app called NectarLink. I build cool stuff in the open on 𝕏 @thtbee_, so come see what's next. Feedback, bugs or ideas? DM me directly.

NectarLink came out of my own frustration. I kept juggling Phone Link for notifications and messages, KDE Connect for the clipboard and LocalSend for files, and always wanted one app that did all of it. So I made one.

It covers what those three did for me, with one app on each side, plus a lot of new features I wanted that I think you'll enjoy having too.

Both apps update themselves from GitHub Releases and check every download against its SHA-256 sums.

1. Install NectarLink on your PC and on your phone.
2. On the PC, the setup walkthrough shows a QR code. Scan it with the phone (from the NectarLink app or any camera app), or pick the PC from the phone's list of nearby devices and compare a 6-digit code. A USB cable works too.
3. Allow what you want to share. Every feature has its own switch per device, and the sensitive ones are off until you turn them on.
4. Optional: set up Wireless debugging once in the phone app for the features Android reserves for privileged apps (phone apps in windows, real touch input, background clipboard sync). No root, nothing else to install.

The user guide walks through every step and feature.

Stay on top of your phone

• Notifications on the PC, with replies, actions, Live Updates (progress, timers, deliveries) and a Copy code button for one-time codes. Clear on one side, cleared on the other.
• Messages: SMS and MMS conversations plus chats from RCS, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal and other apps in one inbox. Reply, send pictures, start new conversations.
• Calls: see who's calling, answer, decline or hang up from the PC, call any number or contact through the phone, and browse recent calls.

Move things between devices

• Clipboard: copy on one device, paste on the other, with optional encrypted history. Passwords from password managers are never sent, and one-time codes are never kept in the history.
• Files and folders both ways at Wi-Fi speed, with resume after a dropped connection, Send to in File Explorer, and the phone's storage in File Explorer.
• Photos: the phone's camera roll, screenshots and albums on the PC.
• Handoff: links, maps and videos (at the same timestamp) open on the other device.

Use your phone from the PC

• Screen mirroring at up to 60 frames a second with the phone's sound, screenshots and recording.
• Apps: open any phone app in a window of its own on the PC, with its own taskbar icon, running beside whatever the phone shows.
• Type on the phone with the PC keyboard, without mirroring.
• Phone controls on the PC: Do Not Disturb, ringer, volume, flashlight, brightness, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

Use your PC from the phone

• Touchpad, air mouse, keyboard, voice typing and presentation remote.
• Deck: a Stream Deck style grid of buttons for the PC (media, shortcuts, apps, OBS Studio, commands), with live volume and mute.
• Lock, sleep and wake the PC.

Camera and sound

• Phone as a webcam in Zoom, Teams, Meet, OBS and the Camera app.
• Continuity Camera: take a photo or scan a document with the phone and have it on the PC's clipboard.
• Phone as a speaker for the PC's sound, and a voice recorder that saves straight to the PC.

And more: media controls both ways, battery alerts, Find my device, a searchable Timeline of everything that moved, a Command Palette (Ctrl+Alt+Space), a slide-out Shelf, a home-screen widget, and a Connection Doctor that finds and fixes what keeps devices from connecting. Four themes, Hive, Bloom, Glass and Graphite, each in light and dark.

• Local-first. Devices talk directly over your network or a USB cable. Nothing goes through a server, and there's no account.
• End-to-end encrypted. Every connection is QUIC with TLS 1.3, authenticated with device keys exchanged when you pair. Keys are protected by Windows DPAPI and the Android Keystore.
• You decide what's shared. Each paired device has its own feature switches. Remote control of the PC, shell commands and phone storage are off until you allow them.
• The only internet traffic is the update check against GitHub Releases (which you can turn off), and, if you turn it on, Connect over mobile data, which relays encrypted traffic it can't read.

Details: Privacy and security and the security model.

Hive is an exclusive theme: honey, with a living honeycomb that breathes behind the app.

Hive, light	Hive, dark

Also Bloom, soft and colorful; Glass, translucent cards over the Windows backdrop; and Graphite, ink on paper. All in light and dark.

Bloom	Glass	Graphite

_{The phone's apps on the PC, each in a window of its own.}

_{The phone's texts on the PC.}

_{The whole phone screen in a window, with mouse and keyboard control.}

_{Pairing by QR code, and the Android app once connected.}

 Android app (Kotlin, Compose)            Windows app (Qt Quick, Rust)
          │ UniFFI                                │ cxx-qt
          ▼                                       ▼
 ┌─────────────────────┐   QUIC (iroh),   ┌─────────────────────┐
 │  nectarlink-core    │◄────────────────►│  nectarlink-core    │
 │  pairing, sessions, │  end-to-end      │  pairing, sessions, │
 │  storage, features  │  encrypted       │  storage, features  │
 └─────────────────────┘                  └─────────────────────┘

• One core, two apps. Protocol, pairing, sessions, the trust store and the capability matrix live in Rust (core/) and run unchanged on both platforms.
• Native on both sides. A Windows 11 app built with Qt Quick and Rust, and an Android app built with Jetpack Compose.
• Capability matrix. Both apps work out which features a pair of devices supports and what would enable the rest, so the interface never offers something that can't work.
• Protocol. Versioned and documented in docs/protocol/v0.md: length-prefixed CBOR messages on QUIC streams.

core/
  nectarlink-protocol/   Message types, framing, pairing cryptography      (MPL-2.0)
  nectarlink-core/       Identity, trust store, pairing, sessions, features (MPL-2.0)
  nectarlink-ffi/        UniFFI bindings used by the Android app          (MPL-2.0)
  nectarlink-adb/        Wireless debugging client for the phone's helper  (MPL-2.0)
  nectarlink-cli/        Command-line client (`nectarlink`)                (GPL)
desktop/
  app/                   Windows app: Rust host, cxx-qt bridge, QML UI     (GPL)
  vcam/                  Windows 11 virtual camera Media Foundation DLL    (GPL)
  installer/             NSIS installer script and Sparse Package manifest (GPL)
android/                 Android app: Kotlin and Jetpack Compose (API 26+) (GPL)
assets/fonts/            Fonts both apps ship with                         (OFL-1.1)
assets/brand/            The app icon (see the trademark policy)
tools/xtask/             Code generation (theme tokens) and checks         (GPL)
spikes/                  Technical experiments with their results
scripts/                 Build, packaging and check scripts
docs/                    Guide, technical docs, protocol, design system    (CC BY 4.0)

cargo test -p nectarlink-protocol -p nectarlink-core -p nectarlink-ffi   # core and tests
cargo run -p nectarlink-cli -- --help                                     # command-line client
cargo run -p nectarlink-desktop                                           # Windows app (Qt's bin on PATH)
cd android && ./gradlew assembleDebug                                     # Android app

./scripts/package.ps1    # Windows installer: target\package\Nectarlink-<version>-x64-setup.exe
./scripts/check.ps1      # every check CI runs; add -Android and -Arm64 for the full set

Releases are built by CI from a v* tag; see docs/technical/releasing.md.

• User guide: setup, pairing and every feature, on Windows and Android
• Technical documentation: architecture, security model, protocol, storage, performance and builds
• Protocol v0 and the capability registry
• Architecture decision records and the design system
• Project plan and roadmap

Ask questions, share ideas and show your setup in Discussions. Issues are for bugs and agreed feature work.

Contributions are welcome. Please read CONTRIBUTING.md first; for anything larger than a small fix, open an issue to agree on the approach. Contributions are accepted under the Developer Certificate of Origin, and everyone is expected to follow the Code of Conduct.

To translate NectarLink into your language, see docs/translating.md.

To report a security issue, follow SECURITY.md. Please don't open a public issue.

• Windows and Android apps, CLI: GPL-3.0-or-later, with an app-store exception
• Core libraries: MPL-2.0
• Protocol specification and documentation: CC BY 4.0

See LICENSE for which license applies where. The NectarLink name and logo are covered by the trademark policy.