Comment by gertop
3 days ago
Have you confirmed that the new feature works without an account or is that speculation?
The account requirement for nearby share never made sense yet they still did it the way...
3 days ago
Have you confirmed that the new feature works without an account or is that speculation?
The account requirement for nearby share never made sense yet they still did it the way...
The account requirement for nearby share is, as I understand it, to enable "contacts only" mode, which is how you prevent people from receiving random dickpics the second they try out the protocol and permanently turn the feature off afterwards. I think NS also has some kind of cloud transfer backup connection in case local transfers don't work (using Samsung's cloud), but I'm not 100% sure if that's related.
The account requirement can already be avoided using existing implementations of standard QuickShare (i.e. https://henriqueclaranhan.github.io/rquickshare/) but those are limited to devices sharing the same WiFi connection. However, as there is no contact sharing between iOS and Android, interoperability basically forces Google to pick between "Google account optional" and "doesn't work with iOS".