Support .local network addresses

[magneticflux-]

I wish to be able to connect to my local computer easily using its mDNS name. Unfortunately, this it not natively supported in Android. It may be possible to use a third-party library to implement the zeroconf spec for this specific application.

This looks like a promising library: https://android-arsenal.com/details/1/3220

[erickok]

Hmm maybe. Using https://github.com/jmdns/jmdns directly seems more appropriate. And regardless it is pretty neat but a very speicif cuse case, so not sure if I want to dip my toe in this.

[tmetro]

very speicif use case...

Using mDNS is becoming increasingly common, with many OSs and services publishing their existence on the LAN. It's a really low-effort way to get name resolution on a LAN, and avoids needing to set up a DNS server.

I find it rather annoying that Android doesn't have mDNS resolution built-in, and instead requires every app developer to implement the lookup, and as a result almost no apps support it. (Supposedly iOS supports mDNS at the OS level.)

I've been working around this by using a static IP, but would like to use mDNS.