Comment by layer8

They were required to drop AWDL, yes. They had to reimplement AirDrop.

https://www.ditto.com/blog/cross-platform-p2p-wi-fi-how-the-...

Bump didn't use direct device-to-device communication. A central server correlated the two bumping phones, based on geolocation and accelerometer data, then swapped the data via the server. At least that's how it worked in the early days. (Wiki page confirms)

Since it's relying on your internet connection, skeptical it'd be faster than AirDrop for a large amount of data like photos. But for swapping contacts I bet it was faster since it didn't have to spend time establishing a new direct connection.

Waaay back when in Japan, sekigaisen (infrared) was a verb meaning to transfer contact details or photos or whatever between phones via infrared. It was amazing how fast the iPhone took over Japan and killed off their quirky phone ecosystem.

Edit: want to emphasize that it was totally ubiquitous. Every phone has it

When I was pretty early in my career, I inherited a legacy project from the CTO who didn't want to maintain it anymore. We decided as a team that I'd just recreate the project with a modern tool chain.

A few weeks later, the CTO looked at my work and asked why it was missing xyz features from his legacy project, saying that if I'm gonna take a project and rewrite it, it better be at least as good as the old project.

It was a pretty good lesson for me to get early in my career, and I've carried it with me ever since. Don't break or rewrite that which already works.

It's evident that no one at Google ever got that lesson.

NB: I know Google definitely has other reasons for acquiring and killing off Bump — they were probably building a competing technology that was shitty and bump was doing it better and sooner than them so better to buy and kill than to make their own product better. But I think my the lesson from my anecdote still stands from a purely product point of view, and I feel like it should make business sense but apparently you can make bad micro business decisions as long as you can convince shareholders they were good macro business decisions.

I do wonder how many great little user-friendly bits of software got destroyed in aquishutdowns. Incredible way to deploy capital to delete software, but that's the big internet world for you.

If I am not mistaken, Bump still required a connection to the Internet. WiFi Aware does not, because the phones create an ad-hoc link on the spot.

The connection can be very fast. In this example, a 280 MB file is transferred in less than 10 seconds:

https://vimeo.com/418946837

What's sad is what largely replaced device to device transfers was just messaging apps. But messaging apps compress media horribly. iMessage isn't so bad, but send a photo through almost anything else and all meta data is stripped, and the image resolution and bitrate are the absolute bare minimum to look ok on a phone. But try to print it and it will be horrible.

Very cool, didn't know such app had existed, thank you! Wanted to use a similar approach to connect people in a smaller friends-only social network.

Bump was like magic.

The only app I have ever truly thought “this is the future”

I can almost guarantee it wasn’t faster than airdrop (when it works) is today. I remember using bump on wifi, and it was limited to (shocking) wifi speeds at the time. I have as recently as last week transferred 1GB video files in under 20 seconds using airdrop. That simply was not possible in 2009.

AoE2 is not known for great network code, so I think the hopes for that specifically are pretty slim.

Do we have proof this actually happened, or theorising based on EU requirements?

I understand that. But "this feature" is simply sending a file around between the two big mobile operating systems. It's absurd to me how this is a big product launch in 2025.

Not necessarily, Since 2015 launch NAN has been vaporware outside android, nobody else support it. Windows does not do so today either [1].

In Linux iw and the new cfg80211 NAN module has support for some hardware. There are few chips in desktop/laptop ecosystem that have the feature, but it is hard to know which ones today, it is more common not to have support than to.

AFAIK no major distros include UI based support that regular users can use. Most Chromebooks do not have the hardware to support, ChromeOS[2] did not have support OOB, so even Google does not implement it for all their devices in the first place.

For Apple to implement is easier than Microsoft or Google given their vertical control, but not simple even if they wanted to. They may still need a hardware update/change and they typically rollout few versions of the hardware first before they announce support so most people have access to it, given the hardware refresh cycle it is important for basic user experience which is why people buy Apple. What is the point if you cannot share with most users because they don't have latest hardware? Average user will try couple of times and never use it again because it doesn't "work".

Sometimes competing standards / lack of compliance are political play for control of the standards not about vendor lock-in directly. Developers are the usual casualties in these wars, rather than end users directly. Webdevs been learning that since JScript in the mid 90s.

All this to say, as evidences go this is weak for selective compliance due to regulatory pressure.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/2284386/...

[2] I haven't checked recently

Look, you might be right. But you might be wrong. We don't know for sure.

One of my first jobs was in infosec, and there was a sign above one of the senior consultant's door quoting Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". That quote is right.

There's so much going on at any medium-to-large organisation, from engineering to politics and personalities. All that multiplied across hundreds of thousands of people in thousands of teams. Its possible you're right. Apple might have provided an iOS-only SDK for wifi aware because of regulatory pressure. Its also possible they want to provide it on all platforms, but just started with an ios only version because of who works on it, or which business unit they're part of, or politics, or because they think its more useful on ios than on macos. We just don't know.

Whenever I've worked in large organisations, I'm always amazed how much nonsense goes on internally that is impossible to predict from the outside. Like, someone emails us about something important. It makes the rounds internally, but the person never gets emailed back. Why? Maybe because nobody inside the company thought it was their job to get back to them. Or Steve should really have replied, but he was away on paternity leave or something and forgot about it when he got back to work. Or sally is just bad at writing emails. Or there's some policy that PR needs to read all emails to the public, and nobody could be bothered. And so on. From the outside you just can't know.

I don't know if you're right or wrong. Apple isn't all good or all bad. And the probability isn't 100% and its not 0%. Take off the tin foil hat and have some uncertainty.

Apple will never leave the EU market, that would be a stupid decision. EU is barely smaller than the US market if looking at GDP per capita, it's only a difference of ~$16,000. If looking at population, EU is larger than the US.

Hopefully they keep cracking open the walls of Apple's garden and Apple stops region locking the changes to just those markets.

The day Apple leaves the EU will be the day that its shareholders will string Apple's CEO up by his own entrails.

His successor will immediately reverse course.