Mighty disheartening that getting any two devices to talk to each other at all is an undertaking if not an ordeal let along having a seamless experience across several of varying form factors. 😿

So true. A close friend of mine is just getting into software. He’s a former electrical engineer who worked at Bell Labs in the 70's on some really cool stuff - the man’s sharp as they come. But trying to explain how to set up a network so he could control his circuits from his phone… He was just lost, and understandably so. It’s just nuts how complex it all is.

The freaking nuts thing, is that easiest way to get two devices sitting right next to each other to talk is to put the whole internet and a web server between them!!1! (Yes, the "1" is an intentional profanity.)

once, the internet had(real) IP addresses… on a perhaps overly object-level note, most modern phones RPi's etc will answer hostname.local pings, so if they're /reliably/ right next to(read: same WiFi) each other you can get away with just opening a port; but it's true that if sometimes there is a whole internet between them, you need a server out on that internet somewhere for routing, and thus fuss about setting up ZeroTier or somesuch (for a particularly polished mix of the two, check out https://snapdrop.net/, which does still need a web server to ~ start ~ the devices talking to each other as a cost for working directly in the browser sandbox)

I forgot about ZeroTier! That was on my list of things to investigate for this problem!