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BitTorrent thinks QR codes are the best way to share photos with friends

BitTorrent thinks QR codes are the best way to share photos with friends

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BitTorrent's Sync file-sharing technology is one of the most important products the company offers right now — it fully fits with the company's philosophy of having no access to your data, and the paid pro level service is one of the company's newest monetization efforts. Today, BitTorrent is announcing it is putting that technology toward a simple new service called BitTorrent Shoot — an app for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone that is probably best described as a cross-platform answer to Apple's Airdrop.

In a nutshell, Shoot is a way to quickly share photos and videos with your friends, regardless of whether they're using an iPhone, an Android device, or a Windows Phone device — but like Airdrop, you'll need to be in close physical proximity to use Shoot. That's because Shoot uses QR codes, something that works well enough but feels a bit hacky in this day and age. If you're the sender, you choose the files you want to transfer and then your phone will display a QR code; the receiver scans it with their camera and the files move on over. Since it uses BitTorrent's sync technology, nothing ever goes up to a cloud or into another company's servers, something the company is quick to stress.

QR codes are back!

Being able to quickly send photos to your friends in the moment across platforms sounds enticing, but it's a problem that has largely already been solved — you can send photos using Facebook Messenger or any other number of chat programs across platforms, or even just use good old MMS. There's also the new Google Photos that can quickly generate a link to any photos that have been uploaded to the service. BitTorrent Shoot doesn't require anything to be uploaded first, so that's a point in its favor, but we're not quite sure a service based on QR codes is going to be able to stand out from the competition at this point. If you want to give it a shot, the app launches today for $1.99. You can install the app for free to try it out — you can send three photos, after which you'll be prompted to pay to unlock the app.