Shiny.Net.Http — The Mobile Library Workhorse You Didn't Know You Needed | Community Feed

HttpClient is fine until the user answers a text. Allan Ritchie walks through Shiny.Net.Http, the background transfer library he has maintained since a 2016 Xamarin plugin, and why handing the socket to the OS is the only way large uploads and downloads survive real phones.

What you’ll learn

Why HttpClient loses the file — iOS suspends the process and the socket with it, and Android ends up in the same place under memory pressure, so a large upload restarts from zero on cellular
What the library already owns — a persisted queue, pause/resume/cancel with Range requests, a metered-network policy, retries, bearer-token refresh through OnAuthorizationFailed, tus resumable uploads, and Azure Blob and S3 builders without vendor SDKs
The call that barely changed — AddHttpTransfers, then Queue with an HttpTransferRequest, and an HttpTransferDelegate for completion. The app can be suspended a second later and the bytes keep moving
Progress when you want a screen — TransferProgress with bytes, speed, percent, and ETA; WatchTransfer for one job; HttpTransferMonitor for a bindable list that is already in the right place after the process dies
Progress when the user is not in the app — an iOS Live Activity or Android foreground-service notification via AddTransferProgress, with no Swift and no notification plumbing
Where it runs — iOS, Android, Mac Catalyst, Windows, Linux, macOS, and Blazor, trimmable and AOT friendly

Read the post before you write another retry loop, then follow the docs if the library fits the files your app already moves.