How to Share Files Between Android and Windows 10 on Your Network

With smartphones becoming a near-essential part of everyday life, you may find yourself in moments where you want to transfer files between an Android device and Windows 10. Fortunately, it’s very easy to achieve this these days!

How to Access Android Files on Windows 10

It’s worth noting first that there are plenty of ways to perform this transfer. Bluetooth is useful, as is plugging in a cable between your PC and your phone. However, this tutorial focuses on how to transfer over your Wi-Fi network.

There are plenty of apps that can achieve this, but for the sake of this article, we’ll focus on a solution that’s both easy to do and doesn’t require any software to be installed on your PC. That way, there’s no fiddly setup or bloatware – just a quick and easy transfer.

Even with these restrictions, the competition is pretty tight. However, we’re going to settle with the Sweech app for this tutorial. This is because Sweech is very quick to set up; you could be transferring files within one to two minutes of downloading it!

When you download Sweech, press the large play button that appears and give the app permissions to access your files. Then, Sweech will show you a local IP address and port.

Type it into the web browser on your PC, hit Enter, and you’ll see your phone’s file system.

Now, you can browse your phone as if it were a folder on your PC. This includes dragging files from your phone onto your PC, as well as putting files into folders on your phone. Once you’re done, tap the Stop button on the app to shut off the file transfer.

Every time you use Sweech, it will use the same IP address and port. As such, if you don’t want to keep typing in the address when you use Sweech, you can bookmark the page for quick access.

You can use the shortcuts on the left to filter content by type. You can even send data to your phone’s clipboard from your PC. Just type what you want on it, then click the blue clipboard icon to transfer it to the phone.

How to Access Windows 10 Files on Android

Accessing Windows 10 folders on Android is a little trickier. First, you need to make the file or folder accessible by outside devices.

Making a File or Folder Public

The easy way to do this is to move or copy the files over to your Windows 10 Public folder. Typically, this is located at C:UsersPublic . This folder is special because it’s automatically set up to allow other users on your network to access it.

If you want to share a folder without moving it to Public, you can set it up as if it were in the Public folder. To do this, right-click the file or folder you want to share, then click Properties.

Go to the Sharing tab, then click Share.

On the drop-down menu, select “Everyone,” then click Add. Click on Share at the bottom right.

By default, you’ll need your user credentials to access your PC’s public folders from outside. If you’d rather not enter them every time, and you trust all the devices on your network, you can instead disable the requirement and allow guests to see your public files.

To do this, type “advanced sharing” in the Start menu and select the option that appears.

Scroll down to the “All Networks” category – you may need to expand it. In this category, find “Turn off password-protected sharing” and click it, then click Save Changes.

Now you can access your public files without logging in. Be sure to turn this back on if you don’t want others on your network snooping on your files!

Accessing the Files on Android

Now it’s time to get access to those files. You’ll need a file explorer that has LAN capabilities so that it can access your PC.

If you have an app of choice, use that. For this article, however, we’ll be using FE File Explorer. We chose this app because it makes it easy to connect to your PC, whether you’re using an account or a guest login.

When you boot up FE File Explorer, tap the Plus button at the bottom right.

Here, you can enter the network details of your PC. If you’re on the same Wi-Fi network as your PC, you need not bother; just scroll to the bottom and find your PC in the neighborhood section.

The app will ask you if you want to log in to your PC or use a guest account. If you kept password-protected sharing on, select the top option and log in. If you turned it off, select the guest option.

Once done, you should now be able to navigate your PC’s public folders. Navigate to the files you want to download, then either tap the three dots next to a single file to see all the actions you can perform or hold-press a file to select multiple files to download or move.

As you can see, it is quite easy to transfer files between Android to Windows 10. If you are using Mac, you can make use of OpenMTP to transfer files from Android to Mac.

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Simon Batt is a Computer Science graduate with a passion for cybersecurity.