Comment by esbranson
3 months ago
As mentioned by others, this apparently uses Wi-Fi Aware (aka Neighbor Awareness Networking or NAN). I'd be interested to know if the wpa_supplicant NAN interfaces can be used.[1]
[1] https://w1.fi/cgit/hostap/tree/wpa_supplicant/README-NAN-USD
It does not. AirDrop, and to my knowledge all other Apple functionality, still uses AWDL. For backwards compatibility reasons, the EU did not require Apple remove AWDL, just that any improvements benefiting AWDL also affect Wi-Fi Aware. The EU also did not require Apple make AirDrop interoperable, only that they stop disadvantaging third-party competitors in certain ways (and those changes aren't implemented in iOS 26, the deadline for it is next year). Google's implementation was purely done via reverse-engineering, similarly to the existing OpenDrop project.