I'm pretty sure this is just incorrect. According to the linked report[1], they tested it for compatibility with OpenDrop, so I think they simply implemented AWDL.
That might also explain the limited Pixel 10 rollout, if it required a specific WiFi chipset/firmware.
> Close-range wireless file transfers: this feature allows to access the same iOS-controlled features as Apple’s services in third-party file sharing apps, creating, for example, alternatives to AirDrop.
> Under pressure from the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), Apple is being forced to ditch its proprietary peer-to-peer Wi-Fi protocol – Apple Wireless Direct Link (AWDL) – in favor of the industry-standard Wi-Fi Aware, also known as Neighbor Awareness Networking (NAN). A quietly published EU interoperability roadmap mandates Apple support Wi-Fi Aware 4.0 in iOS 19 and v5.0,1 thereafter, essentially forcing AWDL into retirement. This post investigates how we got here (from Wi-Fi Direct to AWDL to Wi-Fi Aware), what makes Wi-Fi Aware technically superior, and why this shift unlocks true cross-platform peer-to-peer connectivity for developers.
That's what was confusing to me. It's one thing for Apple to add wifi aware by force, it would be another for them to completely reimplement Airdrop with it. I don't think they were required to do that.
Waayy back in 2009 we had Bump [1], which allowed transfer between devices and later web apps as well – by banging your phone against the spacebar. It worked 98% of the time and was faster than AirDrop is today, even though we only had 3G.
This is great! I notice that’s on the ditto blog. I can see why the ditto developers are watching with keen eyes!
I have a modern digital camera complete with wifi and bluetooth. There’s an app that lets me connect the camera to my iPhone for monitoring, remote shooting and copying photos. Very useful! But right now the only way for the camera to connect to my phone is through some super complicated song and dance, involving my phone requesting a connection over Bluetooth, then the camera running a wifi access point that my phone connects to (during which time my phone disconnects from my home wifi). It’ll be wonderful when my camera can use wifi aware instead, and this can all happen instantly, without permission prompts and without booting me off wifi in the process.
I really hope we see a resurgence in local-first networking. My wife and I can't even play a LAN game of Age of Empires 2 on a plane unless the flight has wifi.
Do we know for a fact that DMA has anything to do with it? According to Google, Apple had nothing to do with this announcement. The way I have read it is a bunch of Google hackers reverse engineered Airdrop and that's that. And it's coming to other Android devices, so the Pixel 10 lock-in is just a marketing move.
The DMA forced Apple to move all of their P2P Wi-Fi stuff from their proprietary AWDL stack to the current Wi-Fi Aware-based implementation. Whatever work Google did to reverse engineer Airdrop was based on the Wi-Fi Aware implementation of Airdrop, rather than the older AWDL. They didn't get the whole stack for free, but it's not nothing either.
MacOS doesn’t have a gatekeeper status in the Digital Markets Act (DMA), so Apple doesn’t need to provide it. This shows that they only provide the SDK because of regulatory pressure, and try to maintain their vendor lock-in where possible.
Apple is going to leave the EU market anytime now, and US is even a bigger market, they didn't leave EU and will for sure not leave US, they could be a positive force for the world instead of just saying "noooo but the rich will leave uuuus"
Using macOS 26 and iOS 26 I was unable to reproduce their findings. I airdropped a photo from my iOS device to my laptop, and nothing in `mdls`, `xattr -l`, `exiftool -s`, `rg -i` showed my name.
It wouldn't surprise if Apple had fixed this, it's the sortof thing they would fix, but it may be worth trying with 2 devices not from the same iCloud account. Wouldn't surprise me if the code paths were subtly different in that case.
Just a tip - You can put any string as your name for your Apple ID. you can also change it at any time. I have it as Mac Book. It's not checked when making any credit card payment, AFAIK.
Just keep in mind, if you give your device to the Apple Store for repairs, they'll automatically expect the person who is picking up to have a matching ID to the Apple account.
It was a fun misunderstanding to resolve when I went to pick up my repaired Macbook Pro and they expected my ID to say Mark Suckerberg. It was resolved relatively uneventfully but still had to get the manager over.
If you're someone who's bought into the Apple ecosystem over multiple devices, or ave a partner or children who are also using devices in the Apple ecosystem, then your Apple ID is something that is very definitely tied to you and probably difficult to change/give up when you replace your phone.
I don't think it would be at all surprising to find that the vast majority of people use their legal name or something closely associated with their identity, and that it persists over multiple devices.
As defensible as it may be, your behavior is very far from the norm. You may not consider this a aggressive privacy practice but demographically speaking, it absolutely is.
Incredible! In an astounding feat, it has only taken a mere two decades to enable the world's largest tech companies to provide the most basic levels of interopability.
At this breakneck speed of technological development, one can only imagine what wonderful boons await consumers in the next few decades.
For the first 3, that's mostly because technology has stopped being a productivity tool and became an ad delivery vehicle with some vestigial (and deteriorating) productivity features.
I am still think that transfering state between devices is the next big thing(tm) waiting to happen. I am working on a file on my macbook, now I want to seamslessly move the whole application working on it to my nearby Windows machine and just continue. Seems impossible right now.
Apple has been iterating on Handover and Continuity for many years and it’s still not perfect (maybe it’s better on a newer stable of devices, I couldn’t say). But it’s clearly challenging even within a tightly coordinated ecosystem; I suspect crossing the platform divide reliably would be extremely hard.
Though I think it is important to point out, that the reasons are very different ones. It is not due to some technological difficulties. It is more. about ruthless companies throwing logs between our legs in some cases, then just lack of skill and quality in some cases, and people not being very high on the computer literacy scale.
It’s not if you pay the price. I have a Brother printer (inkjet) and it literally just works. I can go months without printing anything, then I just print a document from my phone or laptop and it just works.
This is something that should be normal but I’m still amazed every time I use it because I had an Epson before and the experience was… not the same.
> It's amazing how seemingly trivial things turn out to be really hard to be in practice
There is nothing "amazing" there, just big tech trying to lock you up in their ecosystem and make your use of "other" devices as difficult as it can be.
One of those apps that "just works". Been using it recently to share files between an Android phone and my Mac. Turns out it works better than Airdrop itself when I couldn't send a file from my iPhone to my Mac. Great user experience as well.
Really? It has been by far the fastest and simplest option I've found and use across all my devices these days. Not that I looked very deep though, like pairdrop and such.
can please someone build a iphone+ android app which does conveniently what cimbar (cimbar.org) does? than we do need much less of those filesharing activities, because videos go up to a few mb, and bigger than that.. well you can encrypt, share key via such an app and then upload to whereever.
I think specifically latest Pixels are often Google's beta testers. The enthusiasts owning them are happy to get features first and won't complain too much if it's rough around the edges. The phone is also not big enough revenue driver for them to be afraid that too many people would abandon it due to buggy new features
Also `we welcome the opportunity to work with Apple to enable “Contacts Only” mode in the future` doesn't make it sound like Apple actually helped implement this
That hardware is completely unrelated to such a simple feature. Something like AirDrop will only use fairly trivial crypto, which most likely ciphers with full acceleration available but even without it would work fine with plenty of performance headroom.
Neither Apple nor Google is doing anything revolutionary with their silicon for such a standard compute task. It's really mostly minor tuning to get a more optimal part instead of an off-the-shelf chip catering to other uses too, with die area and power consumption "wasted" in your setup.
We've reached the point where a program that simply links file selection dialog APIs with network identity broadcast and file transfer APIs is so difficult to get working, that you can't expect it to be functional without the exact specified hardware and software version it was written for.
We get the early worm. At the same time, as a screenreader user, I wished that I didn't miss the responsiveness and ease of use of my old Samsung Galaxy S9+. I fail to comprehend how Google managed to make a phone which is harder to use than something produced 7 generations ago.
At the same time as we have companies trying to push their humanoid robots with AI and all, we finally have devices able to communicate with each other again. Vendor locking is such a stupid thing.
~a month ago I saw a comment on HN someone stating that the only possible way to send data from computer to phone is to convert it to base64, open it in a text file (several pages), photo them, OCR them and convert them back on the phone.
The comment got deleted shortly after, but I like the idea of someone actually trying to send data from computer to phone, failing, and settling on this method
Reading between the lines, it seems like Google is playing a bit of chess here. Reminds me of the Beeper Mini stunt, except this time by a trillion-dollar company they can't just sweep under the rug.
> we welcome the opportunity to work with Apple to enable “Contacts Only” mode in the future.
> I applaud the effort to open more secure information sharing between platforms and encourage Google and Apple to work together more on this.
That's how it reads to me. They made a big deal during the Pixel 10 launch to talk about Apple/iOS features, and switching from iPhone to Pixel. They called the blue/green bubbles childish, and they put Magasafe in the Pixel and explicitly said "you can use all your Apple accessories."
Google is going hard after iPhone users by trying to punch holes in Apple's walled garden anytime they can. AirDrop is another hole in the wall, as was Magsafe, and RCS.
If Google can get other AWDL features working between macOS and Android, particularly universal clipboard and universal control, I'd seriously consider switching back to Android after many, many years on iOS purely for the ecosystem integration. iMessage doesn't bother me, but I use AirDrop, AirPods auto switching on calls, and universal clipboard daily and those are all blockers for my considering a switch.
When we asked Google whether it developed this feature with or without Apple’s involvement, Moriconi confirmed it was not a collab. “We accomplished this through our own implementation,” he tells The Verge. “Our implementation was thoroughly vetted by our own privacy and security teams, and we also engaged a third party security firm to pentest the solution.” Google didn’t exactly answer our question when we asked how the company anticipated Apple responding to the development; Moriconi only says that “…we always welcome collaboration opportunities to address interoperability issues between iOS and Android.”
The file system is the ultimate API, and it gives the user an enormous amount of control to take data, copy it, back it up, transform it, encrypt it, send it places, restore it, etc.
Yes - it’s not like they have had a literal app called “Files” since 2017 and if you install apps like Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive etc they all show up in the Files app and are choosable destinations from any app that uses the Files dialog…
They have rolled it back over the years. Theres a full files app now, USBs can be easily plugged in to the iPhone, every app that allows exporting allows saving to the files section, etc.
They did a pretty hard reverse on that. There's now a full Files app with integration with other apps (cloud storage, asset managers like Adobe, terminals for SSH transfers, etc). Unfortunately a lot of apps have never caught up and will only save stuff in the pre-Files sandboxes and not the shared local or cloud containers.
Looks like this is an Apple problem that can ve solved by not using Apple products. Every once in a while I look at some Apple device and think it's nifty. Shortly after I'm made aware of some thing or other that they can't do because Apple just doesn't like standards, open source, or just freedom itself.
Until reading this thread, I had no idea that iPhones did not support Bluetooth for file transfer. I had expected comments like "we can do this with an entry-level phone via Bluetooth already".
On the other hand, with the ubiquity of always-on Internet access and cheap data plans, in most situations where Bluetooth would have been used, I now see WhatsApp being used instead.
Yes. When my mom got her first Android phone, she wanted to transfer all her photos from her Motorola Razr flip phone. She said the guy at the AT&T store had a device that would plug in to the data ports of various phones and transfer stuff between them, but it wouldn't do it, so he declared it impossible.
My mom was upset that she would lose her photos, so I puzzled over it for a long time trying to figure out a way. Finally, I realized I was being stupid and missing the obvious: both phones had Bluetooth! I paired them with each other, dug through Razr menus, selected the photos, and did a Bluetooth file send. As expected, the photos went right over. Well, I shouldn't say right over because it was very slow, but it worked just as it should.
When I was in high school we chatted exchanging notes/txt files between Nokias, LGs, Samsungs and Sony Ericsson feature phones and Windows Mobile (I had an HP one) and Symbian (two friends who had a N95) smartphones.
This was just as broadband was getting popular, so those who had it usually downloaded MP3s and then distributed them at school through Bluetooth. I remember one friend using her phone as a bridge to copy files from me using Bluetooth and sending to another friend's phone using IR.
This was across all the classroom, this definitely wasn't restricted to the nerdy clique. We found out that chatting through notes exchange worked pretty well and then it spread like wildfire. SMSes were expensive in my country!
This was like 20 years ago. Maybe 2006-2007. Twenty years later we're commemorating that Bluetooth File Exchange over WiFi is now interoperable between the only two major mobile OS as if it were a revolutionary technology. How backwards it is.
I miss being able to plug my phone (of any kind) in and getting it mounted as a drive letter.
Android misses the mark so much with MTP and iPhone… waves frantically at iTunes.
(At least, in a weird bizarre twist, the iPhone’s Files app is actually really useful for me. I find myself formatting flash drives, copying stuff from network shares, etc, all from my phone and it’s so nifty to have nearly-first-class features there.)
MTP is really, really bad. I have a better experience managing files on iOS devices using Linux than I do managing files on Android devices using macOS simply because available MTP implementations are so awful.
I know that read/write conflict concerns are what got USB Mass Storage mode removed from Android, but surely there's some way to resolve that. Like it wouldn't bother me a bit if Android just locked the device and put it in "file transfer mode" when it's mounted on a computer, similar to how iPods used to and how Kobo e-readers do now. It'd be worth the universal robust multi-platform support.
Do we know yet whether this will require Google Play Services and the like on Android? Or, worse, SafetyNet? I dream of using this on GrapheneOS without any Google stuff.
I'd be surprised if it did, there's no technical reason to require those. Also, SafetyNet is deprecated in favor of Play Integrity, so you're not likely to see the former in any new apps/services.
Why is it still so dodgy to share my clipboard between my cheap brand (i.e. non-Pixel) 4-year old Android phone and my Windows 11 PC? It's a failure on both Google's and Microsoft's part.
KDE Connect handles that and a ton more very seamlessly imo. Not sure if the solution has to be first-party to qualify as "non-dodgy" but for a third-party solution it's pretty damned good
Throwing in my support for kde connect. It's just super convenient and it's FOSS + cross platform too. kde should honestly advertise it aggressively. There's nothing like it anywhere else.
Because functional clipboard sharing would make you more productive and so you'll generate less "engagement" and screen time. Neither of those companies benefits.
Around 2008 I saw two girls, not too versed in technology, share a mp3 song over bluetooth. At the time I thought that if technology finally arrived at the point where "normal people" could be able to do things that required lots of technical knowledge just a few years ago then we were very close to a future where technology could be a giant enabler of powers to everyone.
I am really ashamed by how wrong I was and how WE allowed things to became so artificially limited.
In high school (2003-2007) it was super easy for any of my friends and I (varying technical levels) to send arbitrarily large files to each other with AOL Instant Messenger's Direct Connect. Honestly not even sure how a non-technical person would do that nowadays.
The closest I've seen is 'send file over message service or e-mail', but this has a decently low maximum file size.
The alternative for larger files is Dropbox or Google Drive or similar and share a link, but there are limits to how full you can have those be, so sending a 5 GB file might be inconvenient if you don't pay for the upgraded service.
For anything larger than that again, I don't think I would do anything than pass a physical flash drive, since there's nothing else that has a lower barrier of entry and I can rely on a random person to be able to use and understand.
It seems that this is directional, flowing from Android to Apple but not necessarily back (e.g., me airdropping a photo to my parent who uses Android). I'd love for this to work in the other direction as well.
There's a gif on the blog showing file sharing in both directions. Apparently "Contacts only" sharing doesn't work yet, as mentioned in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45995586
Long overdue, there should really be an open standard for wireless sharing of files. Windows? macOS? Linux? Android? iOS? Switch2? PS5? Doesn't matter, just open the wireless file transfer window and it should just work. Having to install third-party apps for such basic functionality is ridiculous.
If we had a functional government every major tech CEO would get called by congress, grilled about this bullshit, and told to sort it out unless they want to get some bullshit legislation shoved down their throat.
I am with you. How is it that in the past we got major successes like TCP/IP, 802.3, HTTP and WiFi but somehow in the past decade big tech decided that was too much collaboration and it would be better for everyone to stop doing that?
TCP/IP was DARPA, so publicly (taxpayer) funded. The first HTTPd was public domain. WiFi was a bit of a combo of Vic Hayes & Bell Labs, IEEE and a research org so not exactly a public or public domain project.
Big tech and profit/rent seeking is literally the problem. Things don't interoperate because it's not profitable for them to interoperate.
We stopped undertaking large public works projects in tech and outsourced it all to private companies. Big tech is literally the problem.
This is why free and open source software is so important.
How different would things look if httpd wasn't public domain, and Tim instead started a tech company, made it proprietary, etc.
One of my many side projects was a thing called ODO .. linux box hooked up to the TV, running a web browser provided and intranet web page where you can browse media and files tree and thus share files.
Could also use it to play media - so a phone or tablet could act as a remote control from anywhere in wifi reach, and play music on the main TV screen / speakers or on the local device.
Was pretty cool, but didnt have the funds to commercialize it.
If implemntations have been around for a while but it only happened now, then it's 99% chance that's it's Apple backpedalling and trying to weasel their way around DMA.
5.4.8. Implementation timing
(245) Apple should provide effective interoperability with the P2P Wi-Fi connection
feature by implementing the measures for Wi-Fi Aware 4.0 in the next major iOS
release, i.e. iOS 19, at the latest, and for Wi-Fi Aware 5.0 in the next iOS release at
the latest nine months following the introduction of the Wi-Fi Aware 5.0
specification.
Is the benefit transferring "local" via BT instead of across the internet as a text message attachment? Because I do the latter plenty, but pretty much never AirDrop anything to anybody, even if they're sitting next to me.
AirDrop uses P2P wifi for the actual transfer which can make it significantly faster than transferring through the internet, which makes a big difference for photos, videos, and other large files. It also works out in the middle of a forest where there are no wireless connections as well as it works in the middle of NYC.
I used them. Compression is an issue in other protocols (sending via WhatsApp, for example). Another benefit is that photos sent by Airdrop get automatically backed up. It also works well in areas with poor internet connectivity. For example, some beaches have weak cellphone signals due to their surroundings, so when meeting friends, we generally use Airdrop.
I'm sitting in the beach with no data connectivity whatsoever, much less any WiFi network anywhere close; my partner just asked me to send a copy of the photos we just took with my phone 10 mins ago. That's the use case. Not outside reach of a WiFi or 4G network much for you, then?
Another easy example of use case is wanting to share a file during a flight or while being overseas on a boat.
Huh, so assuming this will work with macOS as well, this eventually makes NearDrop, my macOS app that goes the other way around by implementing Google's Quick Share, obsolete.
Does anyone remember the old YouSendIt? That was a really easy way to share files with anyone. You uploaded a file to their site, and you should share a secret link.
That’s more or less how iMessage works when you send a file. It encrypts the file on your device, uploads it to iCloud, and then sends a link and the decryption key as an iMessage (so it’s E2EE) to the recipient.
To ensure a seamless experience for both Android and iOS users, Quick Share currently works with AirDrop's "Everyone for 10 minutes" mode. This feature does not use a workaround; the connection is direct and peer-to-peer, meaning your data is never routed through a server, shared content is never logged, and no extra data is shared. As with "Everyone for 10 minutes" mode on any device when you’re sharing between non-contacts, you can ensure you're sharing with the right person by confirming their device name on your screen with them in person.
This implementation using "Everyone for 10 minutes” mode is just the first step in seamless cross-platform sharing, and we welcome the opportunity to work with Apple to enable “Contacts Only” mode in the future.
That would probably require cooperation with Apple.
The contact-only mode is authenticated using an Apple-signed device certificate and a signed record of those contact identifiers (as hashed UUIDs) that have been registered for a particular Apple ID associated with the device.
Someone with a Mac can extract those from the keychain (the people behind OpenDrop have a tool to do this), but otherwise you'd need to register a new apple ID, get Apple to register the contact information, register a device of some sort and then do all the key exchanges.
Generally, you don't have to open settings. The the built-in share menu from a file has quick share as an option and if someone shares something with you, you'd get a notification.
and more importantly, AirDrop works without network, it's P2P. There's situations where the devices you want to share to/from aren't on the same network or can't put them on the same network for various reasons.
In some ways we’re gone backwards. Sharing MP3 via Bluetooth on non-smart phones in 2007 was a common event when I was at school, that and burning CDs.
is it just the proprietary quickshare that no other rom or even os can implement ? sure won't care to open to read that shit from g**gle and assume it is.
AirDrop works very infrequently for me. I will open AirDrop and not see someone who's sitting right next to me, or then I'll send them the file and it'll get stuck on "waiting" and they'll never get the notification, or it'll send some of the files then seem to get stuck partway through.
This is all with modern day iPhones, like iPhone 15 and above, and just using it in what should be the happy path. I'm actually really surprised every time I hear people say it's so good, because I almost always have to end up just imessaging a picture instead and finding that it works much better.
One thing I like about Android Quick Send is that you can generate a QR code, that the other person scans, and it'll send the file to them. I use it so rarely, and most people I know are the same, so usually it's just turned off and I find a lot of other Android users are the same.
Ah, makes me think of MacOS system 7 days. MacOS formatted the 3.5" disks with its own filesystem, so if you copied a file onto it, and put the disk in a Windows PC (or DOS?), the PC would go "Huh?".
3 decades later, hooray, now we can share files between Android and iPhone!
Operating systems have always used their own filesystems, and it persists to this day.
The only obvious exceptions that come to mind are iso9660 as a standard for CDs, and people generally go out of their way to use FAT/FAT32/whatever on USB keys and SD cards for compatibility with cameras or whatever device they're plugging the card into. But the latter is a choice users actively make to ensure the FS is compatible with the device, rather than a default.
I distinctly remember how it was the bare minimum. You'd mount a disk or open a plain text file, and there'd be a lot of strange characters that weren't decoded properly.
What I want to know is under what circumstances Quick Share will send the files over the internet, and how exactly I can prevent that and force it to go solely over the local network. Nearby Share had the ability to control this, and it seems they deliberately removed it from Quick Share.
AirDrop compatible Quick Share isn't even going over the local network. It create an adhoc device-to-device wireless connection and the files are sent that way. So the two phones don't even need to be on wifi or be on the same network at all. The local network isn't involved.
Given this, I think there's minimal risk of it sending files over the internet.
It's odd that I'm far more likely to use standard internet protocols to transfer files when I'm within Bluetooth range of other phones, when the Bluetooth option works faster and more efficiently.
I can’t believe iPhone interoperability is still so bad. The group chats on iMessage have weird effects when you switch to android, where your friends will send messages that don’t reach you because they’re still sending it as iMessage to the whole group. The iCloud on windows doesn’t work and won’t sync files properly will use up your CPU. The entirety of iTunes is terrible and awkward. And of course, the functionality on AirPods is crippled outside of their ecosystem. These companies need more regulations not less.
Low level hardware access for opening a file and a network port? Those are some of the first lessons in any programming tutorial. If they aren't available, what is the OS even doing?
Also, for all intents and purposes, GMS is part of the Android OS, but Google had to branch it off, to keep it closed source.
100% of the time when I want to share a file from my phone to another phone, the other phone is not owned by me and I can’t just install some software on it
Granted, this is an edge case: I'm a musician. I use an Android tablet for sheet music. That's great when I have WiFi access, otherwise, file transfer is hard. Not impossible, but awkward when show time is in 5 minutes and someone has brought some brought some new material that they want the band to play.
The almost universal solution is "should have gotten Apple."
AirDrop is cool because it works offline with relatively high bandwidth using local RF. If you want to wait for you and the target to transmit all the data to/from some server 1000 miles away (using up your precious bandwidth quota along the way) that’s always been an option.
I just airdropped 130 photos from my phone to my coach and I was sure it would take forever. The preparing stage on my phone took maybe 10 seconds, and the actual transfer took what looked like 2 seconds. I couldn't believe it.
I know there are better ways to transfer stuff. I am just saying that a majority of people don't tend to use them regardless of how easy/compatibles alternatives are.
They naturally choose to transfer stuff from the same app that they are using to communicate with others.
Of course, only because Apple and Google did everything in their power to prevent people sending files directly between devices. When you have a duopoly that splits the population in two parts and they can't send files between them, of course users will rely on messaging apps to share stuff.
Short story: I did a long trip across two continent with my wife. Me with an Android devices, her on iOS. We did backup our photos in our own private cloud but guess how we had to quick exchange photos while in the wild (no wifi and sometimes no network)? We couldn't. Because Google and Apple did everything so we couldn't.
Google wants to your data and fought for the cloud. Apple don't want Android users to easily partake in some data exchange with iOS users (you gotta buy your ticket to their jail). So sad you don't realize how backward that is.
I don't think that is the reason. I think people tend to choose by default the same app they are communicating on. It just feels more natural and straightforward.
The same thing used to happen (and still continues) with emails. Even with shared cloud drives synchronized to their computers an awful lot of people are still sending files by email/teams/ticketing systems.
Yes, because it's almost the only cross-platform way to do it. It used to be email, then pictures become almost too big to fit into attachments (and bandwidth, think about the days of 3G) and messages have less friction anyway.
Besides what others have mentioned, it's also nice for moving files between your own devices - I use AirDrop all the time for transferring files between my iPad and Mac.
That's my first thought too, as an Android user. But Apple culture is about using what's built in, the path of least resistance, and Android/Windows are more for tinkerers who seek out their favorite solutions from a wide variety of third party options.
This is based on Wi-Fi Aware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_Alliance#Wi-Fi_Aware
Some background: https://www.ditto.com/blog/cross-platform-p2p-wi-fi-how-the-...
On the Apple side, this was prompted by the EU Digital Markets Act: https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/questions-and-answe...
I'm pretty sure this is just incorrect. According to the linked report[1], they tested it for compatibility with OpenDrop, so I think they simply implemented AWDL.
That might also explain the limited Pixel 10 rollout, if it required a specific WiFi chipset/firmware.
[1] https://www.netspi.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/google-fea...
In the last link provided by parent you can read:
> Close-range wireless file transfers: this feature allows to access the same iOS-controlled features as Apple’s services in third-party file sharing apps, creating, for example, alternatives to AirDrop.
As you can read here (https://www.ditto.com/blog/cross-platform-p2p-wi-fi-how-the-...):
> Under pressure from the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), Apple is being forced to ditch its proprietary peer-to-peer Wi-Fi protocol – Apple Wireless Direct Link (AWDL) – in favor of the industry-standard Wi-Fi Aware, also known as Neighbor Awareness Networking (NAN). A quietly published EU interoperability roadmap mandates Apple support Wi-Fi Aware 4.0 in iOS 19 and v5.0,1 thereafter, essentially forcing AWDL into retirement. This post investigates how we got here (from Wi-Fi Direct to AWDL to Wi-Fi Aware), what makes Wi-Fi Aware technically superior, and why this shift unlocks true cross-platform peer-to-peer connectivity for developers.
That's what was confusing to me. It's one thing for Apple to add wifi aware by force, it would be another for them to completely reimplement Airdrop with it. I don't think they were required to do that.
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I was experimenting with this technology almost a decade ago as part of my work as interaction designer:
https://darker.ink/writings/Mobile-design-with-device-to-dev...
It has a lot of potential but unfortunately it has been kept back until now by lack of support and interoperability.
Waayy back in 2009 we had Bump [1], which allowed transfer between devices and later web apps as well – by banging your phone against the spacebar. It worked 98% of the time and was faster than AirDrop is today, even though we only had 3G.
Google acquired it and immediately killed it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bump_(application)
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AirDrop works via AWDL, I think you're just wrong...
Not anymore.
This is great! I notice that’s on the ditto blog. I can see why the ditto developers are watching with keen eyes!
I have a modern digital camera complete with wifi and bluetooth. There’s an app that lets me connect the camera to my iPhone for monitoring, remote shooting and copying photos. Very useful! But right now the only way for the camera to connect to my phone is through some super complicated song and dance, involving my phone requesting a connection over Bluetooth, then the camera running a wifi access point that my phone connects to (during which time my phone disconnects from my home wifi). It’ll be wonderful when my camera can use wifi aware instead, and this can all happen instantly, without permission prompts and without booting me off wifi in the process.
I really hope we see a resurgence in local-first networking. My wife and I can't even play a LAN game of Age of Empires 2 on a plane unless the flight has wifi.
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Do we know for a fact that DMA has anything to do with it? According to Google, Apple had nothing to do with this announcement. The way I have read it is a bunch of Google hackers reverse engineered Airdrop and that's that. And it's coming to other Android devices, so the Pixel 10 lock-in is just a marketing move.
The DMA forced Apple to move all of their P2P Wi-Fi stuff from their proprietary AWDL stack to the current Wi-Fi Aware-based implementation. Whatever work Google did to reverse engineer Airdrop was based on the Wi-Fi Aware implementation of Airdrop, rather than the older AWDL. They didn't get the whole stack for free, but it's not nothing either.
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Is it actually? Apple supports AirDrop over Wi-Fi Aware? Any source or confirmation?
It's hilarious that such a simple thing has taken this long for the world to build, and it's only because Apple was forced to allow it.
Oh, I fully expect Apple to have a hissy fit about this. <queue in incoherent ramblings about privacy and user choice in 3... 2... 1...>
Apple's users bought iPhones en masse without them having this feature.
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Pretty sure that ditto article is written by AI ... there's an entire section dedicated to the imagined 5.0 spec..
It's interesting that apple released 3rd party Wi-Fi Aware SDK for iOS and iPadOS but no for MacOS...
MacOS doesn’t have a gatekeeper status in the Digital Markets Act (DMA), so Apple doesn’t need to provide it. This shows that they only provide the SDK because of regulatory pressure, and try to maintain their vendor lock-in where possible.
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Thank you for the pro-consumer regulation, EU.
[flagged]
Apple is going to leave the EU market anytime now, and US is even a bigger market, they didn't leave EU and will for sure not leave US, they could be a positive force for the world instead of just saying "noooo but the rich will leave uuuus"
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Possibly relevant comment from a few years ago: >AirDrop also shares your full name (seemingly the one associated with your Apple ID, not what you have set for yourself in your contacts), both by displaying it in the sharing interface on the involved devices and by attaching it as an extended attribute to uploaded files.
>So if you AirDrop some files to your computer and then zip them up, anyone you send that zip to (a journalist, a public file-hosting site, w/e) will have your full legal name to go with them.
Linked article from that thread is moved tohoherd
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lathiat
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NaomiLehman
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therein
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buildbot
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Using macOS 26 and iOS 26 I was unable to reproduce their findings. I airdropped a photo from my iOS device to my laptop, and nothing in `mdls`, `xattr -l`, `exiftool -s`, `rg -i` showed my name.
It wouldn't surprise if Apple had fixed this, it's the sortof thing they would fix, but it may be worth trying with 2 devices not from the same iCloud account. Wouldn't surprise me if the code paths were subtly different in that case.
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Just a tip - You can put any string as your name for your Apple ID. you can also change it at any time. I have it as Mac Book. It's not checked when making any credit card payment, AFAIK.
Just keep in mind, if you give your device to the Apple Store for repairs, they'll automatically expect the person who is picking up to have a matching ID to the Apple account.
It was a fun misunderstanding to resolve when I went to pick up my repaired Macbook Pro and they expected my ID to say Mark Suckerberg. It was resolved relatively uneventfully but still had to get the manager over.
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Is anything but the zip code actually checked ever? Besides the number and cv2 or whatever.
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"... then zip them up, anyone you send that zip to (a journalist, a public file-hosting site, w/e) will have your full legal name ..."
A bit of a leap to assume that your Apple ID (or the name you give your iphone) is your full legal name ... or related to any name at all ...
My apple ID is built specifically for just that phone and is jettisoned when I upgrade/change the phone. The apple ID is not related to my own name.
I don't consider this an aggressive - or even interesting - privacy practice.
Did you use your full legal name when you signed up with Blizzard for WoW ? Why would you do anything different for Apple ?
They are not the IRS. They are not a passport agency. They are not the government. Stop treating them that way.
If you're someone who's bought into the Apple ecosystem over multiple devices, or ave a partner or children who are also using devices in the Apple ecosystem, then your Apple ID is something that is very definitely tied to you and probably difficult to change/give up when you replace your phone.
I don't think it would be at all surprising to find that the vast majority of people use their legal name or something closely associated with their identity, and that it persists over multiple devices.
As defensible as it may be, your behavior is very far from the norm. You may not consider this a aggressive privacy practice but demographically speaking, it absolutely is.
So you repurchase your entire App Store library when you upgrade your phone?
Incredible! In an astounding feat, it has only taken a mere two decades to enable the world's largest tech companies to provide the most basic levels of interopability.
At this breakneck speed of technological development, one can only imagine what wonderful boons await consumers in the next few decades.
The astounding feat of reinventing Bluetooth...
Apple could have implemented this a long time ago but decided not to implement Bluetooth file sharing.
They're might have exhausted their centennial budget of cooperation on trivial things!
I feel like we have finally entered the 21st century! Next stop moon bases and flying cars!
It's amazing how seemingly trivial things turn out to be really hard to be in practice. Like:
- sharing files between two phones
- printing a page on that printer over there
- getting the projector to display my screen (correctly, or at all)
- getting my wife not to click on a link in a random email
For the first 3, that's mostly because technology has stopped being a productivity tool and became an ad delivery vehicle with some vestigial (and deteriorating) productivity features.
Except Apple is the one making file sharing hard between non-Apple devices and they aren't making most of their money on ads
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- sharing files between two phones when Apple's monopolistic tendencies are involved
I've been using Quick Share to send files between different makes of Android phone for ages. This is entirely on Apple.
I wish that would work when you don't have internet.
Had to fall back to old school bluetooth, and like 1 MB/s to share a video with a friend.
I’ve been using AirDrop to send files between different mames of iOS phone and tablet for ages.
I am still think that transfering state between devices is the next big thing(tm) waiting to happen. I am working on a file on my macbook, now I want to seamslessly move the whole application working on it to my nearby Windows machine and just continue. Seems impossible right now.
Apple has been iterating on Handover and Continuity for many years and it’s still not perfect (maybe it’s better on a newer stable of devices, I couldn’t say). But it’s clearly challenging even within a tightly coordinated ecosystem; I suspect crossing the platform divide reliably would be extremely hard.
Seems like that would be pretty huge.
Though I think it is important to point out, that the reasons are very different ones. It is not due to some technological difficulties. It is more. about ruthless companies throwing logs between our legs in some cases, then just lack of skill and quality in some cases, and people not being very high on the computer literacy scale.
I don’t understand why printing is still so difficult in 2025
It’s not if you pay the price. I have a Brother printer (inkjet) and it literally just works. I can go months without printing anything, then I just print a document from my phone or laptop and it just works.
This is something that should be normal but I’m still amazed every time I use it because I had an Epson before and the experience was… not the same.
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> It's amazing how seemingly trivial things turn out to be really hard to be in practice
There is nothing "amazing" there, just big tech trying to lock you up in their ecosystem and make your use of "other" devices as difficult as it can be.
And of course deny it along the way.
> getting my wife not to click on a link in a random email
Hot take: MUAs should simply not make links clickable/copyable on render, or even strip any URI away completely.
Shoutout to https://localsend.org/ - it can even open a local webserver if needed.
LocalSend requires the devices to be on the same local network. TFA is about file sharing using a direct device-to-device wireless connection.
We've had ad-hoc WiFi for about 3 decades, but that requires a level of device access that no gatekeeper will agree to anymore.
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I prefer https://pairdrop.net/ ; nicer interface
To continue the thread, my favorite is https://drop.lol
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One of those apps that "just works". Been using it recently to share files between an Android phone and my Mac. Turns out it works better than Airdrop itself when I couldn't send a file from my iPhone to my Mac. Great user experience as well.
It's slow as suffering in hell.
Really? It has been by far the fastest and simplest option I've found and use across all my devices these days. Not that I looked very deep though, like pairdrop and such.
So what's better than this?
+1. Easy to use and works on every platform. Also supports sending plain text between your devices (into clipboard of recipient).
Not the same.
can please someone build a iphone+ android app which does conveniently what cimbar (cimbar.org) does? than we do need much less of those filesharing activities, because videos go up to a few mb, and bigger than that.. well you can encrypt, share key via such an app and then upload to whereever.
Why only the pixel 10? What piece of hardware is the pixel 9 (one year old) missing?
I think specifically latest Pixels are often Google's beta testers. The enthusiasts owning them are happy to get features first and won't complain too much if it's rough around the edges. The phone is also not big enough revenue driver for them to be afraid that too many people would abandon it due to buggy new features
Then I assume they'll roll it out further
For better or worse, I do own Pixel 10
It says starting with pixel 10, so I assume itll roll out to the others after some time
https://security.googleblog.com/2025/11/android-quick-share-...
From the linked security report in that post https://www.netspi.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/google-fea... it seems like they implemented something similar to https://github.com/seemoo-lab/opendrop (which was also used to test interoperablity
Also `we welcome the opportunity to work with Apple to enable “Contacts Only” mode in the future` doesn't make it sound like Apple actually helped implement this
That's just how they roll out features these days, in about 6 months it'll be on every Pixel and in about a year or so on every Android.
The answer to your 2nd question might be Google's custom silicon: https://blog.google/products/pixel/tensor-g5-pixel-10/
The answer to your first question may simply be they want to sell more Pixel 10 phones.
The investment into custom silicon is more likely to pay off when new and exiting features are exclusive to the newer platform.
That hardware is completely unrelated to such a simple feature. Something like AirDrop will only use fairly trivial crypto, which most likely ciphers with full acceleration available but even without it would work fine with plenty of performance headroom.
Neither Apple nor Google is doing anything revolutionary with their silicon for such a standard compute task. It's really mostly minor tuning to get a more optimal part instead of an off-the-shelf chip catering to other uses too, with die area and power consumption "wasted" in your setup.
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previous pixel phones also had custom Google silicon, just with some Samsung IP
Yay if you pay additional fee you will maybe get Bluetooth file sending to PC
We've reached the point where a program that simply links file selection dialog APIs with network identity broadcast and file transfer APIs is so difficult to get working, that you can't expect it to be functional without the exact specified hardware and software version it was written for.
We get the early worm. At the same time, as a screenreader user, I wished that I didn't miss the responsiveness and ease of use of my old Samsung Galaxy S9+. I fail to comprehend how Google managed to make a phone which is harder to use than something produced 7 generations ago.
I use this app called LocalSend between my Mac, my phone, and my Windows. It's genuinely a godsend, and I hope whoever reads it tries it
Finally in 2025, a revolutionary advancement in technology.
We didn't have the processing power for this before!
AI made some PhD productive enough for this to finally be possible.
At the same time as we have companies trying to push their humanoid robots with AI and all, we finally have devices able to communicate with each other again. Vendor locking is such a stupid thing.
~a month ago I saw a comment on HN someone stating that the only possible way to send data from computer to phone is to convert it to base64, open it in a text file (several pages), photo them, OCR them and convert them back on the phone.
The comment got deleted shortly after, but I like the idea of someone actually trying to send data from computer to phone, failing, and settling on this method
Am I right to assume that they simply implemented AirDrop without discussing with Apple?
I remember reading somewhere Apple had/has to make AirDrop interoperable due to EU's DMA.
How long until Apple disables it outside of the EU?
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Well since absolutely no one buys Pixeld to a first approximation and mostly in the US. Looking at different sites it’s from 3-6% marketshare.
I doubt this was done for the DMA.
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So is Airdrop now less secure or private? I don't trust any standard Google had their hands in.
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I was wondering the same. Looking at the statements in the posts, I think so?
Reading between the lines, it seems like Google is playing a bit of chess here. Reminds me of the Beeper Mini stunt, except this time by a trillion-dollar company they can't just sweep under the rug.
> we welcome the opportunity to work with Apple to enable “Contacts Only” mode in the future.
> I applaud the effort to open more secure information sharing between platforms and encourage Google and Apple to work together more on this.
Your move, Apple.
That's how it reads to me. They made a big deal during the Pixel 10 launch to talk about Apple/iOS features, and switching from iPhone to Pixel. They called the blue/green bubbles childish, and they put Magasafe in the Pixel and explicitly said "you can use all your Apple accessories."
Google is going hard after iPhone users by trying to punch holes in Apple's walled garden anytime they can. AirDrop is another hole in the wall, as was Magsafe, and RCS.
If Google can get other AWDL features working between macOS and Android, particularly universal clipboard and universal control, I'd seriously consider switching back to Android after many, many years on iOS purely for the ecosystem integration. iMessage doesn't bother me, but I use AirDrop, AirPods auto switching on calls, and universal clipboard daily and those are all blockers for my considering a switch.
I am reminded of Microsoft implementing a YouTube app for Windows Phone, and Google repeatedly blocking it.
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I think Apple will be ok with this, it clearly shows Android being less capable/compatible than other iPhones, a bit like blue/green bubbles
You're right.
There is a different article with a comment by google here:
https://www.theverge.com/news/825228/iphone-airdrop-android-...
> Update, November 20th: Added a quote from a Google spokesperson confirming that Apple was not involved in the development of this feature.
Key quote from The Verge article:
When we asked Google whether it developed this feature with or without Apple’s involvement, Moriconi confirmed it was not a collab. “We accomplished this through our own implementation,” he tells The Verge. “Our implementation was thoroughly vetted by our own privacy and security teams, and we also engaged a third party security firm to pentest the solution.” Google didn’t exactly answer our question when we asked how the company anticipated Apple responding to the development; Moriconi only says that “…we always welcome collaboration opportunities to address interoperability issues between iOS and Android.”
https://www.theverge.com/news/825228/iphone-airdrop-android-...
And if Google does this as well as the RCS rollout, I can look forward to attempts to use AirDrop to send me viruses and other spammy junk.
If it was profitable to spam bad things using AirDrop, bad guys would just buy iPhones and use them to spam. No alternative implementations necessary.
AirDrop & QuickShare are "contacts only" by default. You have to explicitly enable "receive from anyone" and it's only active for 10 minutes.
The old days of being able to AirDrop something to everyone on a plane because it was set to "everyone" by default are over.
The fact that I get excited about this is actually a good representation much vendor lock there is.
We used to be able to send files over Bluetooth before the iPhone came out.
Ever since the iphone apple has been trying to make you believe files aren't a thing.
The file system is the ultimate API, and it gives the user an enormous amount of control to take data, copy it, back it up, transform it, encrypt it, send it places, restore it, etc.
Apple likes to have far more control than that.
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Because Apple realised that phone users are interested in photos, videos, contacts, documents, appointments etc. not files
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Im not sure if Android has caught up but the iOS file explorer app is excellent.
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Yes - it’s not like they have had a literal app called “Files” since 2017 and if you install apps like Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive etc they all show up in the Files app and are choosable destinations from any app that uses the Files dialog…
They have rolled it back over the years. Theres a full files app now, USBs can be easily plugged in to the iPhone, every app that allows exporting allows saving to the files section, etc.
It goes farther than that. It dates back to at least iPod and iTunes library synchronizing.
What's a computer?
They did a pretty hard reverse on that. There's now a full Files app with integration with other apps (cloud storage, asset managers like Adobe, terminals for SSH transfers, etc). Unfortunately a lot of apps have never caught up and will only save stuff in the pre-Files sandboxes and not the shared local or cloud containers.
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Ios has an app called "Files".
Now "bluetooth" I could buy (and I do not miss at all).
Looks like this is an Apple problem that can ve solved by not using Apple products. Every once in a while I look at some Apple device and think it's nifty. Shortly after I'm made aware of some thing or other that they can't do because Apple just doesn't like standards, open source, or just freedom itself.
It's not enough to not use Apple products. You either have to convince everyone around you to not use them either, or you have to have compatability.
Like what?
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Until reading this thread, I had no idea that iPhones did not support Bluetooth for file transfer. I had expected comments like "we can do this with an entry-level phone via Bluetooth already".
On the other hand, with the ubiquity of always-on Internet access and cheap data plans, in most situations where Bluetooth would have been used, I now see WhatsApp being used instead.
It's really an embarrassment to our society that it took this long. And still only by seemingly by reverse engineering with no cooperation from Apple.
> We used to be able to send files over Bluetooth before the iPhone came out.
Cross platforms, really? So for example between a Blackberry and a Windows CE phone?
> Cross platforms, really? So for example between a Blackberry and a Windows CE phone?
Yes, it was part of the Bluetooth file transfer spec[0] and possible between any two devices that implemented it correctly.
0: https://www.bluetooth.com/specifications/specs/file-transfer...
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Yes. When my mom got her first Android phone, she wanted to transfer all her photos from her Motorola Razr flip phone. She said the guy at the AT&T store had a device that would plug in to the data ports of various phones and transfer stuff between them, but it wouldn't do it, so he declared it impossible.
My mom was upset that she would lose her photos, so I puzzled over it for a long time trying to figure out a way. Finally, I realized I was being stupid and missing the obvious: both phones had Bluetooth! I paired them with each other, dug through Razr menus, selected the photos, and did a Bluetooth file send. As expected, the photos went right over. Well, I shouldn't say right over because it was very slow, but it worked just as it should.
When I was in high school we chatted exchanging notes/txt files between Nokias, LGs, Samsungs and Sony Ericsson feature phones and Windows Mobile (I had an HP one) and Symbian (two friends who had a N95) smartphones.
This was just as broadband was getting popular, so those who had it usually downloaded MP3s and then distributed them at school through Bluetooth. I remember one friend using her phone as a bridge to copy files from me using Bluetooth and sending to another friend's phone using IR.
This was across all the classroom, this definitely wasn't restricted to the nerdy clique. We found out that chatting through notes exchange worked pretty well and then it spread like wildfire. SMSes were expensive in my country!
This was like 20 years ago. Maybe 2006-2007. Twenty years later we're commemorating that Bluetooth File Exchange over WiFi is now interoperable between the only two major mobile OS as if it were a revolutionary technology. How backwards it is.
Most of what are called "dumbphones" allowed easy file sharing over bluetooth. Even the cheapest ones.
Yes, even "dumb" phones could share files with computers back then. Apple users have no idea how much harm their masters have done to society.
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I don’t know about blackberry, but it worked fine between feature phone Nokias and windows pdas / phones (before windows phone 7).
Not just phones, the Mac as well. So it’s not like Apple doesn’t know about this feature of Bluetooth. They just chose not to do it on the iPhone.
Yea, there's a Bluetooth protocol for it called OBEX.
Vendor lock has been here forever.
Here is a more hilarious attempt to break Vendor lock from the 90s!: https://youtu.be/TcJBXgmdX44?t=98
Things were more fun back then. Now Google vs Apple is so BORING! :D
And even via IR port.
I miss being able to plug my phone (of any kind) in and getting it mounted as a drive letter.
Android misses the mark so much with MTP and iPhone… waves frantically at iTunes.
(At least, in a weird bizarre twist, the iPhone’s Files app is actually really useful for me. I find myself formatting flash drives, copying stuff from network shares, etc, all from my phone and it’s so nifty to have nearly-first-class features there.)
MTP is really, really bad. I have a better experience managing files on iOS devices using Linux than I do managing files on Android devices using macOS simply because available MTP implementations are so awful.
I know that read/write conflict concerns are what got USB Mass Storage mode removed from Android, but surely there's some way to resolve that. Like it wouldn't bother me a bit if Android just locked the device and put it in "file transfer mode" when it's mounted on a computer, similar to how iPods used to and how Kobo e-readers do now. It'd be worth the universal robust multi-platform support.
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You can still send files over bluetooth on devices that aren't iPhones. Even Macs support this
i am still sending files over bluetooth between android phones or between phones and computer
Do we know yet whether this will require Google Play Services and the like on Android? Or, worse, SafetyNet? I dream of using this on GrapheneOS without any Google stuff.
I'd be surprised if it did, there's no technical reason to require those. Also, SafetyNet is deprecated in favor of Play Integrity, so you're not likely to see the former in any new apps/services.
> I'd be surprised if it did, there's no technical reason to require those.
That has never stopped Google from requiring Play Services.
QuickShare already requires Google Play Services, so I don't think that will change
Why is it still so dodgy to share my clipboard between my cheap brand (i.e. non-Pixel) 4-year old Android phone and my Windows 11 PC? It's a failure on both Google's and Microsoft's part.
KDE Connect handles that and a ton more very seamlessly imo. Not sure if the solution has to be first-party to qualify as "non-dodgy" but for a third-party solution it's pretty damned good
Throwing in my support for kde connect. It's just super convenient and it's FOSS + cross platform too. kde should honestly advertise it aggressively. There's nothing like it anywhere else.
Because functional clipboard sharing would make you more productive and so you'll generate less "engagement" and screen time. Neither of those companies benefits.
Around 2008 I saw two girls, not too versed in technology, share a mp3 song over bluetooth. At the time I thought that if technology finally arrived at the point where "normal people" could be able to do things that required lots of technical knowledge just a few years ago then we were very close to a future where technology could be a giant enabler of powers to everyone.
I am really ashamed by how wrong I was and how WE allowed things to became so artificially limited.
In high school (2003-2007) it was super easy for any of my friends and I (varying technical levels) to send arbitrarily large files to each other with AOL Instant Messenger's Direct Connect. Honestly not even sure how a non-technical person would do that nowadays.
In Europe, people use WhatsApp for this. Ridiculous to go through a chat app for this, but it works.
They wouldn’t.
This is intentional.
The closest I've seen is 'send file over message service or e-mail', but this has a decently low maximum file size.
The alternative for larger files is Dropbox or Google Drive or similar and share a link, but there are limits to how full you can have those be, so sending a 5 GB file might be inconvenient if you don't pay for the upgraded service.
For anything larger than that again, I don't think I would do anything than pass a physical flash drive, since there's nothing else that has a lower barrier of entry and I can rely on a random person to be able to use and understand.
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Nowadays it's done by uploading something to Google drive and then sharing the link so someone can then download it.
Expensive, overly complex, and stupidly slow.
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Sadly for "normal people" you just share links now. You don't have an MP3 to even send.
You might enjoy this new initiative: https://aol.codeberg.page/eci/
It seems that this is directional, flowing from Android to Apple but not necessarily back (e.g., me airdropping a photo to my parent who uses Android). I'd love for this to work in the other direction as well.
There's a gif on the blog showing file sharing in both directions. Apparently "Contacts only" sharing doesn't work yet, as mentioned in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45995586
The video shows both directions.
The demo shows it working both ways, so you're in luck
I came to the same conclusion when I clicked the link to try it out, just watching the video now to verify that the flow is both ways.
Only took 18 years for apple and google, good work! See you in 2043 for next common feature.
Is iPhone still abstracting files away into some kind of seamless data experience for the end user or does is finally understand what files are for?
They have a shiny file system abstraction, but ever since they introduced that, they have allowed downloading arbitrary files into it AFAIK.
There's a files app
Finally! Interoperability like this should’ve existed years ago. Curious how they’re handling privacy & bandwidth
And Pixel phones still not support Miracast because Google want to push their own proprietary tech.
Long overdue, there should really be an open standard for wireless sharing of files. Windows? macOS? Linux? Android? iOS? Switch2? PS5? Doesn't matter, just open the wireless file transfer window and it should just work. Having to install third-party apps for such basic functionality is ridiculous.
If we had a functional government every major tech CEO would get called by congress, grilled about this bullshit, and told to sort it out unless they want to get some bullshit legislation shoved down their throat.
I am with you. How is it that in the past we got major successes like TCP/IP, 802.3, HTTP and WiFi but somehow in the past decade big tech decided that was too much collaboration and it would be better for everyone to stop doing that?
> big tech
That's why.
TCP/IP was DARPA, so publicly (taxpayer) funded. The first HTTPd was public domain. WiFi was a bit of a combo of Vic Hayes & Bell Labs, IEEE and a research org so not exactly a public or public domain project.
Big tech and profit/rent seeking is literally the problem. Things don't interoperate because it's not profitable for them to interoperate.
We stopped undertaking large public works projects in tech and outsourced it all to private companies. Big tech is literally the problem.
This is why free and open source software is so important.
How different would things look if httpd wasn't public domain, and Tim instead started a tech company, made it proprietary, etc.
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Seriously this should be a thing. Would be so much easier.
At this point I don't even want to share files with Apple users.
One of my many side projects was a thing called ODO .. linux box hooked up to the TV, running a web browser provided and intranet web page where you can browse media and files tree and thus share files.
Could also use it to play media - so a phone or tablet could act as a remote control from anywhere in wifi reach, and play music on the main TV screen / speakers or on the local device.
Was pretty cool, but didnt have the funds to commercialize it.
Well that’s nice but given my still extremely poor experiences with Airdrop between 2 iPhones, I remain somewhat skeptical.
What are the chances that this is made possible because of the DMA?
Around 1.0, I would say.
0, this is reverse engineered AirDrop protocol. Implementations have been around for a while, eg: https://github.com/seemoo-lab/opendrop
If implemntations have been around for a while but it only happened now, then it's 99% chance that's it's Apple backpedalling and trying to weasel their way around DMA.
They got smoked in court, see ruling at https://ec.europa.eu/competition/digital_markets_act/cases/2...
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Is the benefit transferring "local" via BT instead of across the internet as a text message attachment? Because I do the latter plenty, but pretty much never AirDrop anything to anybody, even if they're sitting next to me.
AirDrop uses P2P wifi for the actual transfer which can make it significantly faster than transferring through the internet, which makes a big difference for photos, videos, and other large files. It also works out in the middle of a forest where there are no wireless connections as well as it works in the middle of NYC.
It’s great. I used it to move entire folders from my Mac to an account-less iPad with no Internet connection.
I thought it was going to be slow, but hundreds of gigabytes was fully transferred in less than a minute.
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I used them. Compression is an issue in other protocols (sending via WhatsApp, for example). Another benefit is that photos sent by Airdrop get automatically backed up. It also works well in areas with poor internet connectivity. For example, some beaches have weak cellphone signals due to their surroundings, so when meeting friends, we generally use Airdrop.
I'm sitting in the beach with no data connectivity whatsoever, much less any WiFi network anywhere close; my partner just asked me to send a copy of the photos we just took with my phone 10 mins ago. That's the use case. Not outside reach of a WiFi or 4G network much for you, then?
Another easy example of use case is wanting to share a file during a flight or while being overseas on a boat.
I AirDrop files between my different Apple devices pretty regularly.. I guess everyone has their own system for doing things.
Huh, so assuming this will work with macOS as well, this eventually makes NearDrop, my macOS app that goes the other way around by implementing Google's Quick Share, obsolete.
Did you guys notice the number of steps that need to happen to share something as simple as a photo?
Just one extra step: upload all your files to our servers. Trust us, this is for your security.
Can you airdrop it to me peeps in shambles...
Does anyone remember the old YouSendIt? That was a really easy way to share files with anyone. You uploaded a file to their site, and you should share a secret link.
That’s more or less how iMessage works when you send a file. It encrypts the file on your device, uploads it to iCloud, and then sends a link and the decryption key as an iMessage (so it’s E2EE) to the recipient.
What would it take to make it work when reception is set to "contacts"?
not supported right now, but seems they might be able to make it work in the future
https://security.googleblog.com/2025/11/android-quick-share-...
To ensure a seamless experience for both Android and iOS users, Quick Share currently works with AirDrop's "Everyone for 10 minutes" mode. This feature does not use a workaround; the connection is direct and peer-to-peer, meaning your data is never routed through a server, shared content is never logged, and no extra data is shared. As with "Everyone for 10 minutes" mode on any device when you’re sharing between non-contacts, you can ensure you're sharing with the right person by confirming their device name on your screen with them in person.
This implementation using "Everyone for 10 minutes” mode is just the first step in seamless cross-platform sharing, and we welcome the opportunity to work with Apple to enable “Contacts Only” mode in the future.
That would probably require cooperation with Apple.
The contact-only mode is authenticated using an Apple-signed device certificate and a signed record of those contact identifiers (as hashed UUIDs) that have been registered for a particular Apple ID associated with the device.
Someone with a Mac can extract those from the keychain (the people behind OpenDrop have a tool to do this), but otherwise you'd need to register a new apple ID, get Apple to register the contact information, register a device of some sort and then do all the key exchanges.
Why is quick share buried in the settings menu, instead of being an app?
Especially when receiving a file, it makes no sense to start by going into settings.
Generally, you don't have to open settings. The the built-in share menu from a file has quick share as an option and if someone shares something with you, you'd get a notification.
You can add it to the quick settings tiles in the notification shade, they show that exact flow in the blog post.
I wonder if this works more reliably than airdropping between my iPhone and MacBook… which seems to be 50% success rate at best.
I was never able to make it work, for some reason.
This sounds great but I can’t even get Airdrop to work reliably between my Apple devices, let alone Android.
If you're using android, you can easily share files over local network (or using your phone as hotspot) with this app: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.MarcosDiez.shareviahttp/
If you're not close, telegram fork allow easy sharing of files too.
but I have to download and app which is the same as downloading Google drive
and more importantly, AirDrop works without network, it's P2P. There's situations where the devices you want to share to/from aren't on the same network or can't put them on the same network for various reasons.
In some ways we’re gone backwards. Sharing MP3 via Bluetooth on non-smart phones in 2007 was a common event when I was at school, that and burning CDs.
I'm sure Apple will slap some annoy-a-trons to it any moment
is it just the proprietary quickshare that no other rom or even os can implement ? sure won't care to open to read that shit from g**gle and assume it is.
This makes me wonder what concessions Google were able to get out of Apple for access to Gemini.
Of course, AirDrop is absolutely awful.
Is the Android equivalent any better?
Curious, why do you think AirDrop is so bad?
As for Android, it works fine, but I’ve probably used that feature only once in the past ten years. I haven't seen others use it either.
AirDrop works very infrequently for me. I will open AirDrop and not see someone who's sitting right next to me, or then I'll send them the file and it'll get stuck on "waiting" and they'll never get the notification, or it'll send some of the files then seem to get stuck partway through.
This is all with modern day iPhones, like iPhone 15 and above, and just using it in what should be the happy path. I'm actually really surprised every time I hear people say it's so good, because I almost always have to end up just imessaging a picture instead and finding that it works much better.
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One thing I like about Android Quick Send is that you can generate a QR code, that the other person scans, and it'll send the file to them. I use it so rarely, and most people I know are the same, so usually it's just turned off and I find a lot of other Android users are the same.
Airdrop is great when it works.
Fucking finally. I just really hope is also lands in AOSP and will be available on all Android phones in the future.
Ah, makes me think of MacOS system 7 days. MacOS formatted the 3.5" disks with its own filesystem, so if you copied a file onto it, and put the disk in a Windows PC (or DOS?), the PC would go "Huh?".
3 decades later, hooray, now we can share files between Android and iPhone!
What does this have to do with System 7?
Operating systems have always used their own filesystems, and it persists to this day.
The only obvious exceptions that come to mind are iso9660 as a standard for CDs, and people generally go out of their way to use FAT/FAT32/whatever on USB keys and SD cards for compatibility with cameras or whatever device they're plugging the card into. But the latter is a choice users actively make to ensure the FS is compatible with the device, rather than a default.
System 7 had built in tools to read and write DOS disks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_File_Exchange
I distinctly remember how it was the bare minimum. You'd mount a disk or open a plain text file, and there'd be a lot of strange characters that weren't decoded properly.
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What I want to know is under what circumstances Quick Share will send the files over the internet, and how exactly I can prevent that and force it to go solely over the local network. Nearby Share had the ability to control this, and it seems they deliberately removed it from Quick Share.
AirDrop compatible Quick Share isn't even going over the local network. It create an adhoc device-to-device wireless connection and the files are sent that way. So the two phones don't even need to be on wifi or be on the same network at all. The local network isn't involved.
Given this, I think there's minimal risk of it sending files over the internet.
Now fix Direct Share on android, which is a highly broken feature and has been for years.
Why, I think you'd be able to send files between two androids via airdrop implementation.
It's odd that I'm far more likely to use standard internet protocols to transfer files when I'm within Bluetooth range of other phones, when the Bluetooth option works faster and more efficiently.
I can’t believe iPhone interoperability is still so bad. The group chats on iMessage have weird effects when you switch to android, where your friends will send messages that don’t reach you because they’re still sending it as iMessage to the whole group. The iCloud on windows doesn’t work and won’t sync files properly will use up your CPU. The entirety of iTunes is terrible and awkward. And of course, the functionality on AirPods is crippled outside of their ecosystem. These companies need more regulations not less.
Nice.
I can also recommend LocalSend.
How did Apple agree to this?
Until they decide we can't again.
The Localsend app is the way
https://localsend.org/
LocalSend requires devices to be on the same local network, which this doesn’t, it establishes a direct Wi-Fi connection.
Duopoly who?
https://xkcd.com/949/
...still relevant
Now we just need universal clipboard between Android and OSX
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Eww, green files?
/s
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Why is this part of the OS?
Because it can't be implemented without low level hardware access. But also, it seems like it's a part of GMS, not of the OS itself.
Low level hardware access for opening a file and a network port? Those are some of the first lessons in any programming tutorial. If they aren't available, what is the OS even doing?
Also, for all intents and purposes, GMS is part of the Android OS, but Google had to branch it off, to keep it closed source.
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Just use Wormhole for file transfer. Small and easy to use. I have put on all my computers, laptops and phones.
100% of the time when I want to share a file from my phone to another phone, the other phone is not owned by me and I can’t just install some software on it
Wormhole can be run in the browser easily.
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Granted, this is an edge case: I'm a musician. I use an Android tablet for sheet music. That's great when I have WiFi access, otherwise, file transfer is hard. Not impossible, but awkward when show time is in 5 minutes and someone has brought some brought some new material that they want the band to play.
The almost universal solution is "should have gotten Apple."
Aren't most people just sending files over whatsapp/signal/whatever instant messaging apps they use?
AirDrop is cool because it works offline with relatively high bandwidth using local RF. If you want to wait for you and the target to transmit all the data to/from some server 1000 miles away (using up your precious bandwidth quota along the way) that’s always been an option.
I just airdropped 130 photos from my phone to my coach and I was sure it would take forever. The preparing stage on my phone took maybe 10 seconds, and the actual transfer took what looked like 2 seconds. I couldn't believe it.
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I've used it multiple times while hiking and outside normal cell phone tower range. Need to transfer 500mb of images and videos? easy.
Another use case is to share pictures with people you just met / don't know without giving them your phone number.
I know there are better ways to transfer stuff. I am just saying that a majority of people don't tend to use them regardless of how easy/compatibles alternatives are.
They naturally choose to transfer stuff from the same app that they are using to communicate with others.
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Of course, only because Apple and Google did everything in their power to prevent people sending files directly between devices. When you have a duopoly that splits the population in two parts and they can't send files between them, of course users will rely on messaging apps to share stuff.
Short story: I did a long trip across two continent with my wife. Me with an Android devices, her on iOS. We did backup our photos in our own private cloud but guess how we had to quick exchange photos while in the wild (no wifi and sometimes no network)? We couldn't. Because Google and Apple did everything so we couldn't.
Google wants to your data and fought for the cloud. Apple don't want Android users to easily partake in some data exchange with iOS users (you gotta buy your ticket to their jail). So sad you don't realize how backward that is.
I don't think that is the reason. I think people tend to choose by default the same app they are communicating on. It just feels more natural and straightforward.
The same thing used to happen (and still continues) with emails. Even with shared cloud drives synchronized to their computers an awful lot of people are still sending files by email/teams/ticketing systems.
Yes, because it's almost the only cross-platform way to do it. It used to be email, then pictures become almost too big to fit into attachments (and bandwidth, think about the days of 3G) and messages have less friction anyway.
Besides what others have mentioned, it's also nice for moving files between your own devices - I use AirDrop all the time for transferring files between my iPad and Mac.
Large files.
or images, which WhatsApp insists on recompressing, which tends to really impact the quality
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That's my first thought too, as an Android user. But Apple culture is about using what's built in, the path of least resistance, and Android/Windows are more for tinkerers who seek out their favorite solutions from a wide variety of third party options.
… and sharing files locally at high speed when you aren’t on a network