The 7 Best Free Alternatives to Pushbullet | Dramel Notes

Pushbullet was one of the best things to happen to Android in a while — it offered utilities like quickly transferring files between devices, sending SMS messages from your PC, and even setting chore reminders — but the bad news is that Pushbullet is no longer free.

Well, technically there is still a free version, but it’s so gutted and crippled compared to what was previously available that it feels insulting to use, and if you want to make use of the Pro features, the price is just obscene ($5 per month).

Fortunately, there are several free alternatives that you can turn to if Pushbullet has left a sour taste in your mouth.

1. AirDroid

Similarities: Remote SMS, mirrored notifications, file transfers.

If you’re looking for an app that’s basically “Pushbullet but not Pushbullet”, then AirDroid is the one you want. Whatever Pushbullet can do, AirDroid can do as well: mirrored notifications, file and folder transfers, remote dialing, and more.

In fact, AirDroid can do some things that Pushbullet can’t, including the ability to view your camera remotely from your computer, take photos of people trying to break into your phone, and dial your phone remotely.

The downsides to AirDroid are that it isn’t as user-friendly as Pushbullet when it comes to setup and operation, and it also has a paywall like Pushbullet. However, the $2 per month cost of AirDroid is far more reasonable.

2. Pushline

Similarities: Remote SMS, mirrored notifications, accept/reject calls.

It’s no coincidence that Pushline’s name is so similar to Pushbullet — the former is basically a clone (or knockoff) of the latter, except completely free. Seriously: no advertisements, no in-app purchases, and no premium version.

It has most of Pushbullet’s features, including mirrored notifications to other devices, writing and replying to SMS messages remotely, sending notes/links/websites between devices, and synchronizing your phone’s clipboard with your desktop’s.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t yet have support for file transfers. However, it can make/accept/reject calls remotely, mute/unmute your phone remotely, and even find your phone if you happen to lose it.

3. MightyText

Similarities: Remote SMS, mirrored notifications.

MightyText consistently remains one of our preferred ways to send free SMS messages from your PC, but the catch is that MightyText is a browser solution rather than a desktop solution like Pushbullet. If that’s a dealbreaker for you, then go ahead and skip to the next one.

MightyText allows the synchronization of notifications, photos, videos, and SMS messages between your Android phone, Android tablets, and desktop browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and IE), and it allows you to send SMS messages from connected devices. It’s free with a 500-per-month message limit.

There is a Pro version that unlocks a few advanced features: scheduled SMS messages, bulk messaging to multiple contacts, sending SMS messages by email, SMS message templates, blocking numbers, no limits, no ads, and more. The $5 per month cost is a bit steep, though.

4. Yappy

Similarities: Remote SMS, mirrored notifications.

Like MightyText, Yappy (formerly Endless Jabber) is a way to synchronize your Android phone with your Android tablets and desktop PCs through the Yappy web app (extensions only exist for Chrome and Firefox).

Feature-wise, Yappy is simpler than MightyText: it can send and receive encrypted SMS messages, synchronize notifications, and initiate calls remotely. That’s about it, but if those were the only Pushbullet features you were using, then Yappy is the ideal alternative for you.

Yappy’s free version has no message limit, which gives it a slight edge over MightyText, but it has ads and only retains messages for 14 days. The Pro version removes ads, has unlimited message retention (making it good for SMS backups), allows message scheduling and searching, and more for just $2 per month.

5. MySMS

Similarities: Remote SMS, desktop app.

Here’s yet another app that synchronizes SMS messages from your Android phone to your Android tablets, iPads, and desktop computers — but unlike MightyText and Yappy, MySMS provides desktop apps in addition to a web app (but only for Windows and Mac).

Unfortunately, the features are pretty limited. Apart from sending and receiving messages remotely, you can get notified when your phone receives a call. At least there’s no limit on how many messages you can send each month.

For $10 per year, you can upgrade to a Premium account that can backup and store messages, schedule message sending, archive messages to the cloud (Dropbox, Evernote, or Google Drive), export your entire SMS inbox, and manage calls from the computer. At less than $1 per month, that’s not bad at all.

6. Infinit

Similarities: File transfers.

Infinit is a neat little tool for people who used Pushbullet for its file transfer capabilities rather than its SMS or notification features. With Infinit, sharing files from one device to another has never been easier.

The app is available for Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, and Linux, so you can rest assured that Infinit will work across all of your devices. It’s easy to use, able to send files and folders, secured with encryption, and robust enough to detect disconnections and finish when your connection is reestablished.

Infinit’s free account allows unlimited transfers with a size limit of 10 GB. You can increase that to 50 GB with a Plus account (either $6 or 2 friend invitations every month). For unlimited file sizes, you’ll need the Professional account at $8.50 per month.

7. Send Anywhere

Similarities: File transfers.

Send Anywhere is like Infinit but arguably better, depending on which features are important to you. It’s available as an app for desktops (Windows, Mac, Linux), mobile devices (Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Amazon Kindle), Chrome, and the web.

When you want to send a file, Send Anywhere uploads it to its servers and generates a six-digit key. Anyone can enter that key into Send Anywhere to begin downloading said file from the servers, but only if they enter it within 10 minutes. When the key expires, the file is deleted.

No sign-ups required, everything is done anonymously, and it’s 100% free — there are absolutely no limits on the number of files or the size of files.

What’s Your Pushbullet Alternative?

It’s unfortunate that Pushbullet did what it did. All we can do now is hope that they alter their pricing model, which is unlikely, or move on to one of these replacement apps. It’s a shame that only AirDroid and Pushline are close to being full stand-ins.

Notifications are a big deal, so once you’ve switched over to whichever alternative you like best, don’t forget to further enhance your Android notification experience.

On the other hand, if all you wanted was a lighter-weight version of Pushbullet that only had the features you actually used (e.g. file transfers), then some of these apps may be exactly what you needed. In that case, go ahead and disable the notifications you don’t need.

So which alternative are you going with? Or are you just going to stick with Pushbullet? Let us know what you’re thinking in the comments below!

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Why You Can’t “Securely Delete” a File, and What to Do Instead | Dramel Notes

Some utilities have a “secure delete” option that promises to securely erase a file from your hard drive, removing all traces of it. Older versions of Mac OS X have a “Secure Empty Trash” option that tries to do something similar. Apple removed this feature recently because it just doesn’t work reliably on modern drives.

The problem with “secure delete” and “secure empty trash” is that it provides a false sense of security. Rather than relying on these sorts of bandaid file-deletion solutions, you should rely on full-disk encryption. On a fully encrypted disk, both deleted and undeleted files are protected.

Why “Secure Delete” Options Were Created

Traditionally, deleting a file from a mechanical hard drive didn’t actually delete that file’s contents. The operating system would mark the file as deleted, and the data would eventually be overwritten. But that file’s data was still sitting on the hard drive, and file-recovery tools could scan a hard disk for deleted files and recover them. This is still possible on USB flash drives and SD cards, too.

If you have sensitive data — for example, business documents, financial information, or your tax returns — you might worry about someone recovering them from a hard drive or removable storage device.

How Secure File Deletion Tools Work

“Secure delete” utilities attempt to solve this problem by not just deleting a file, but overwriting the data with either zeros or random data. This should, the theory goes, make it impossible for someone to recover the deleted file.

This is sort of like wiping a drive. But, when you wipe a drive, the enter drive is overwritten with junk data. When you securely delete a file, the tool attempts to overwrite only that file’s current location with junk data.

Tools like this are available all over the place. The popular CCleaner utility contains a “secure delete” option. Microsoft offers an “sdelete” command for download as part of the SysInternals suite of utilities. Older versions of Mac OS X offered “Secure Empty Trash”, and Mac OS X still offers an included “srm” command for securely deleting files.

Why They Don’t Work Reliably

The first problem with these tools is that they’ll only attempt to overwrite the file in its current location. The operating system may have made backup copies of this file in a number of different places. You may “securely delete” a financial document, but older versions of it may still be stored on disk as part of your operating system’s previous versions feature or other caches.

But, let’s say you can solve that problem. It’s possible. Unfortunately, there’s a bigger problem with modern drives.

With modern solid-state drives, the drive’s firmware scatters a file’s data across the drive. Deleting a file will result in a “TRIM” command being sent, and the SSD may eventually remove the data during garbage collection. A secure delete tool can tell an SSD to overwrite a file with junk data, but the SSD controls where that junk data is written to. The file will appear to be deleted, but its data may still be lurking around somewhere on the drive. Secure delete tools just don’t work reliably with solid-state drives. (The conventional wisdom is that, with TRIM enabled, the SSD will automatically delete its data when you delete the file. This isn’t necessarily true, and it’s more complicated than that.)

Even modern mechanical drives aren’t guaranteed to work properly with secure file deletion tools thanks to file-caching technology. Drives try to be “smart”, and there’s not always a way to ensure all bits of a file were overwritten instead of being scattered over the drive.

You shouldn’t try to “securely delete” a file. If you have sensitive data you want to protect, there’s no guarantee it will be erased and made unrecoverable.

What to Do Instead

Rather than using secure-file-deletion tools, you should just enable file-drive encryption. Windows 10 has Device Encryption enabled on many new PCs, and Professional versions of Windows also offer BitLocker. Mac OS X offers FileVault encryption, Linux offers similar encryption tools, and Chrome OS is encrypted by default.

When you use full-drive encryption, you don’t have to worry about someone getting access to your drive and scanning it for deleted files. They won’t have the encryption key, so even the bits of deleted files will be incomprehensible to them. Even if bits of the deleted files are left on the drive, they’ll be encrypted and just look like random nonsense unless someone has the encryption key.

Even if you have an unencrypted drive that contains sensitive files you want to get rid of, and you’re about to dispose of the drive, you’re better off wiping the entire drive rather than attempting to wipe just the sensitive files. If it’s very sensitive, you’re better off destroying the drive entirely.

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As long as you use encryption, your files should be protected. Assuming your computer is powered down and the attacker doesn’t know your encryption key, they won’t be able to access your files — including the deleted ones. If you have sensitive data, just encrypt your drive and delete files normally rather than attempting to rely on secure-deletion tools. They might work in some cases, but can often offer a false sense of security. Secure file deletion just doesn’t work reliably with modern hard drives.

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