AirMount is the flash photo app that cuts out the cloud

If you’re anything like me, you probably get annoyed with iCloud on a weekly, if not daily, basis. But maybe not for much longer.

With Apple’s iCloud your photos, apps, data and more are stored on their servers, ready for you to access them from anywhere. At least that’s the theory.

In practice iCloud is a mess.

Often I’ll discover photos on my smartphone, sometimes old ones, that just haven’t transferred over to my Mac.

Other times I’ll quickly snap a photo that I want to edit on my laptop, which will usually involve sitting for five minutes, waiting for the iCloud gods to magically move the photo off my iPhone, up into the cloud, then back to my Mac.

Most of the time it’s quicker to literally email the photo between the two devices, which are sitting on a table next to each other.

But there is hope, someone has built a better iCloud, called AirMount.

Meet AirMount

“Why do I need to send my photos across the internet when my Mac is just right here?” That was the question that spurred Neeraj Jhanji to eventually built AirMount.

Jhanji, the creator of the first social network, first tried to answer that question with a clunky USB cable, and later with bluetooth and Apple’s AirDrop.

Read more: Meet the real man behind the social network

Nothing worked well enough. Instead he built AirMount.

“It’s magical because it works without internet, cloud or WiFi, so you can simply just use it anywhere without thinking — at home, at office, a cafe or in an airplane,” Jhanji told The Memo.

AirMount consists of a simple iPhone and Mac app, launch them both and an ‘iPhone’ window pops up on your laptop.

My photos appear instantly.

Huge long lists of thousands of beautiful pictures, which can be edited directly, or copied over to your Mac just by dragging and dropping.

You can even mount an iPhone and an iPad and copy photos between them, again drag & drop, or pop PDFs or other files onto any of these devices.

It’s like cool relief for someone used to spending all day waiting for iCloud to do its business.

“The entire experience is very personal, simple and quick, just how it should be.”

And AirMount isn’t an online service, like Dropbox, or even a slow bluetooth app like Apple’s AirDrop.

“We developed our own secret sauce to make the devices connect to each other directly using their WiFi radios. They don’t need to ‘join’ a WiFi network and it all happens seamlessly in the background,” says Jhanji.

The future of photos?

Now AirMount isn’t perfect.

The software is very buggy and and Jhanji’s 4-person team is ironing out a number of issues.

But the principle of what they’re doing is awesome, and there’s even more coming.

“I would love to be able to extend this experience to Windows users next,” Jhanji told The Memo.

“I imagine a barrier-free world where moving stuff between nearby devices would require no effort and life with multiple devices would be simpler. I want to continue building this amazing technology platform that makes magic happen between nearby devices.”

You can try AirMount right now for free by downloading the Mac and iPhone app. Do be warned, the software is still very much in beta.

But, if you want to break free from the shackles of iCloud today, AirMount is the answer.