Vivo has joined Oppo and Xiaomi in officially announcing its new Peer-to-Peer Transmission Alliance, which will mean fast wireless file sharing between the three companies' phones. 

The technology will allow customers who have phones from any of the three to share files, images, videos, music and documents with each other, without any additional third party apps needing to be installed. 

In the press release, Vivo explains that their technology doesn't require any internet connection. Instead, it uses Bluetooth for fast pairing, and then uses a peer to peer (device to device) Wi-Fi connection for the data transfer. 

On average, customers can expect transfer speeds of around 20MB/s, all the while still being able to use the Wi-Fi connection for internet and regular smartphone use. 

To use it, all the user will have to do is make sure Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are both switched on, and turn on the file transferring function. 

Once that's done, and they've selected the files they want to share, the other user will get a pop-up notification asking them to confirm. 

In theory it sounds a lot like Apple's AirDrop technology which allows Apple device users to quickly share files with each other, or between their own devices. 

With AirDrop, users can quickly and easily send files wirelessly from iPhone to iPhone, or Mac to iPad, or any combination of those. 

With this Chinese alliance, customers using Vivo, Oppo or Xiaomi smartphones will be able to quickly share items with each other. 

As for other Android users, there's already an alternative being worked on by Google too. 

Rumours of an Android Fast Share feature started in summer 2019, with the expectation that it would get its official launch with the Pixel 4 and Android 10. So far, however, that hasn't come to fruition. 

Vivo states that the new peer-to-peer file sharing will be rolled out to new devices from February 2020.