Hi!

I’m a software engineer from Estonia 🇪🇪 who got into photography a couple of years ago.

I’ve always liked Sony products, so the choice of my first mirrorless camera was natural. I chose something relatively budget-friendly, but without any real ceiling for growth: the Sony A7 III.

I loved this camera, but oh boy, I didn’t know what I was getting myself into yet!

During one of my travels in summer of 2024, I was sitting in a tent, checking the photos I’d taken that day. As usual, the photo that was my favourite was too dark because I’d messed up the exposure once again. No worries, I thought - I can just transfer it to my phone, edit it with Lightroom, and show it to my friends!

I launched the native Imaging Edge Mobile app, set the settings to transfer photos at original resolution… and got myself a nice, big JPEG. No matter what I tried, it always transferred a JPEG when I needed RAW…

Of course, I started reading Reddit and saw exactly the same frustration from many others. What was even more frustrating was that the next generation of the Sony A7 - the Mark IV - doesn’t have this limitation at all. Nice move, Sony! (I still won’t upgrade, though.)

The first thing I did when I got back home was decompile Sony’s app to see how the “Send to Smartphone” function worked. Then I recorded the network traffic between the camera and my phone, and tried sending all kinds of commands to the camera, but to no avail - it seemed that the limitation was somewhere in the camera software itself.

Fine, I knew for sure that the camera could transfer photos to my Windows computer via Wi-Fi, right? So how did that work?

A couple of hours of investigation later, I was writing my own (handmade!) implementation of a PTP/IP client in Kotlin.

The first successful RAW transfer via the command line confirmed the idea (September 18, 2024), so I started building my first app with Kotlin Multiplatform.

I continued using the app during my travels and improving it until I was ready to release it for others to test.

So, in 2025, I finally pushed myself, and made a Reddit post asking for testers.

I didn’t expect it, but so many people actually tried it and shared super valuable feedback, which significantly improved the app.

After the testing phase, I finally published the app on Google Play and the App Store.

But the work is never over - both Apple and Google keep me on my toes with their updates all the time.

Some users get stuck at the very beginning of the setup process, so I improve the guide. For others, the app crashes after the connection is established, so I make a bug fix. But one thing I like: the people who write to me are always super nice and collaborative, helping me fix and improve the app.

I might not always have time to check my email (sorry if I haven’t responded to some of you!), but when I do and someone needs help, I can sit and code throughout the night without a single worry - like we’re back in the old days, without LLMs, AI, and all the slop.

If you made it this far - respect, as you still have a mighty attention span 💪, and thank you for visiting!