Coming soon
Coming soon – The Private Mobile Cloud
The line between local storage and the cloud is blurring. Phones, tablets and small home servers are powerful enough to act as their own mini‑data centres. In this article we introduce the idea behind the Private Mobile Cloud, a concept we are exploring for Free Transfer that would let you share files and transfer files in new ways without giving up control.
The problem with traditional clouds
Traditional cloud storage centralises data in large data centres. This has obvious benefits for scalability and availability, but it also concentrates power and responsibility. Users must trust providers to secure infrastructure, respect privacy and remain financially stable. At the same time, many people now own multiple capable devices: phones, laptops, home servers and IoT gateways, all with unused storage and compute capacity.
From a privacy perspective, it would be ideal if more of our data lived on devices we own, while still being easy to access and share. P2P technology already helps us send files secure without leaving long‑term copies on third‑party servers. The Private Mobile Cloud idea extends that thinking further: what if your own devices could cooperate to form your personal cloud, with Free Transfer as the secure fabric that connects them?
A cloud made of your devices
At a high level, the Private Mobile Cloud would treat your phone, laptop and other personal devices as nodes in a small, encrypted network. Instead of uploading everything to a remote data centre, you would designate one or more of your devices as primary storage for certain categories of data. When you share files or transfer files, Free Transfer would help route traffic directly between the relevant devices and the recipient, using P2P where possible.
From the user’s perspective, the experience should remain simple: choose what to send, pick who should receive it, and let the system handle the details. Under the hood, your devices coordinate to ensure that at least one copy of important data is available, without relying on a distant provider. This could include smart replication strategies, so that frequently accessed data lives on devices that are online more often.
Privacy and security at the centre
Any "personal cloud" concept must treat privacy and security as first‑class concerns. For the Private Mobile Cloud, this means strong encryption between nodes, clear separation between different users’ data and minimal metadata. We want it to be obvious which devices hold which categories of information, and easy to revoke access by simply removing a device from the cluster.
This is a natural continuation of the philosophy behind Free Transfer: private file sharing without permanent server‑side storage. With a Private Mobile Cloud, users would gain some of the convenience usually associated with centralised clouds – such as accessible backups and cross‑device sync – while still benefiting from the control and locality of self‑hosted storage.
How it could integrate with Free Transfer
Free Transfer already handles the hard parts of establishing encrypted P2P connections and respecting no file size limit. A future Private Mobile Cloud feature could build on that foundation. For example, when you share files from your phone, the app could choose whether to stream them directly from the device or from a companion node at home, depending on battery level, connectivity and capacity.
Similarly, receiving a file on one device could automatically propagate it, in encrypted form, to other trusted devices you own. That way your personal cloud keeps itself in sync without you having to manually export and import archives. The key is that every step should be under your control and understandable at a glance.