Toss To Self

Have you ever received a link on your phone via a text message (as in SMS), but you want to follow up on a computer?

Toss (AKA TossToSelf) is a desktop/mobile app that sends small snippets of text (not necessarily links) from one device to another, as long as they are on the same local network (WiFi or wired). It is slated to be available for the two major mobile platforms and the three major desktop ones (check their respective app stores, search for "tosstoself"):

• Toss for Windows on the Microsoft Store
• Toss for iOS on the Apple App Store
• Toss for Android on Google Play
• Toss for Linux (x86-84):
  • toss-1.0.0-amd64.deb - for APT based distros (Ubuntu, Debian)
  • toss-1.0.0-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst - for Pacman based distros (Arch)
  • toss-1.0.0-1.x86_64.rpm - for RPM based distros (RedHat, Fedora, SUSE)
  Once you install, there will be a toss command. Run toss -? to see the options.

The sources are available under sevaa/toss on GitHub. It's open source, PRs are welcome.

For support, email me.

Plans

Further development of this project will be driven solely by popular interest. I have some ideas:

• Website on a custom domain
• Tossing files (with proper OS/shell integration)
• Translations to other languages
• Sideloading for Windows
• Support for Windows before 10 Creators Update
• Support for Linux other than x64
• Support for Android before 9
• Support for other proximity protocols (Bluetooth etc.)

I have no plans to monetize this app. There will be no paid license, in-app payments, or ads.

What Toss isn't

Toss is not and won't be an Internet messenger. It was designed to not require any cloud infrastructure - so there is no logic for finding peers over the Internet, and no user/device registration in the cloud. Toss also isn't a background service - messages that are sent to a device while Toss isn't running there will be lost.

Toss currently doesn't keep a history. The user is expected to save the message text themselves.

Toss uses mDNS (AKA Bonjour/Zeroconf/NSD) for advertising and discovering its running instances. There are other proximity based protocols out there - Bluetooth, NFC. The primary use case that I had in mind when developing this was mobile device to a desktop computer, and desktop computers often aren't aware of those.

Seva Alekseyev, 2025