Comment by eigenspace

This is using webrtc and speeds are slower than a physical USB I get 3-4MB/s instead of local network speed of 30MB/s due to browser browser implementation bottlenecks. I needed fast local network sharing of files over 5GB and tried a lot of approaches and speed doesn't budge more than 6-7MB/s .

Also you don't even need a server atleast for now in chrome webrtc transfer can work over a file:// in firefox it doesn't. For signaling you could even use free peerjs tunnel or other when user is connected to internet and otherwise fallback to this QR or offer code sharing. This will become so useful if browsers eliminate those bottlenecks.

also even in localsend speeds are limited usually to my internet speed for some reason.

Whenever I need to use something like this it's because the device isn't mine, which makes this so much better than an app. Would be cool if there was a text message option, and a bit of server so the second scan wouldn't be required. Pretty funny how simple the concept is though.

Doesn't seem to work for sending files from my Mac to my Android - I scan the code on the phone and....nothing happens? I tried sending via FF/Safari/Brave and receiving on FF/DDG. No idea what am I doing wrong.

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Thanks for the tip. Just tried it and it worked great between MacOS and Android.

I use wormhole.app

Very cool, I didn't know about this. I'll watch it with interest.

Right, the first two steps are what make AirDrop, "AirDrop". This isn't an alternative at all if it requires both devices to already be connected to the same WiFi.

AirDrop is fantastic for sharing files with people you don't know/just met - if we have to find and agree to join the same wifi before we interact we are no longer talking about the same feature.

If Apple's AirDrop implementation had required people to join the same WiFi first, the feature would never have taken off the way it has among non-techy users. I'm still today mildly surprised I can use AirDrop as a verb in conversation and most of the time the other party knows what I mean.

> With Airdrop you have trivially easy, "just works" sharing with people in proximity.

Funny enough, I encounter so many problems trying to share things via AirDrop with friends, family, and even my own Apple devices that I just tell everyone to install LocalSend and I find that things work better.

I’m not sure why that is, because AirDrop used to work pretty well for me. But it’s been an exercise in frustration more often than not for me.

(Obviously, LocalSend works only as long as everyone is on the same network.)

setting up local networks is so trivial compared to forcing everyone to buy an Apple gizmo.

Which, in my view, significantly decreases the value proposition, as there is no way to deactivate this feature to my knowledge (at least not without also opting out of other useful features under the "Handoff" umbrella).

A typical Apple feature, dreamed up by engineers that are presumably not aware of the existence of metered data plans...

With color it would be even faster! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Capacity_Color_Barcode

Can't QuickShare cross-platform. My wife has an iPhone and my desktop and laptop are linux, so QuickShare is a non-solution for me.

I don't want to send things over the internet, I want to do things locally.

Not interested in an over-over-the-internet solution. What makes Airdrop good is that it's local.

I literally said that in my comment:

> The workaround I've found after switching to an Android device has been to teather my connection to my friend's device, which ends up creating a LAN that Localsend can work through, but this is not as nice an experience.

"Check out this alternative road vehicle I invented: it works on most surfaces except it can't drive on inter-city roads."

"You could fix that by builing a rail track and using a train."

And everyone you ever want to share files with locally also has access to your home VPN?

That's an even worse solution than the hacky workaround of just teathering my internet connection.

The whole point of these solutions is to not have to transmit data over the internet, it should work over a local dynamic connection.

I literally said that in my comment. I also said it's not as nice an experience.

I'm honestly surprised that WiFi Hotspot doesn't isolate hosts, after companies like Meta have been caught running servers inside their apps and connecting to those to track users.

It does require an internet connection though, which is worse.

How is this at all unique to AirDrop?

Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079.

Both Samsung and Google already did it. My S26 Ultra supports Airdrop and I've tested it by sending and receiving photos with iPad

>It uses a time-sliced channel-hopping mechanism so the radio can serve both infrastructure WiFi and the direct peer link simultaneously.

This seems like such a basic solution that I'm surprised that it isn't required by any of the mainstream standards before WiFi Aware. I wonder if this was some sort of a patent issue or similar.

It is entirely possible to inject (unrelated) wifi frames while being associated to a BSS without violating the existing 802.11 standards. That’s why Apple is able to implement AWDL on standard compliant wifi hardware.

However the path towards this type of interoperability would likely go through additional standardization via IEEE 802.11* and the Wi-Fi alliance. At which point Apple will need to implement and support the new standards. There is no need to reverse engineer AWDL to meet the new European interoperability requirements. What is needed is for wifi chipset OEMs to implement such standardization. Something pretty routine of them.

It can be expected that Apple will also maintain the proprietary AWDL in order to support their legacy devices.

For those interested to read more on AWDL I've listed some interesting articles that I came across during lit review a while back

A research lab from TUD worked on a project investigating Apple's wireless ecosystem Link: https://owlink.org/publications/

Also something interesting that I remembered reading closely linked to AWDL?

Link: https://projectzero.google/2020/12/an-ios-zero-click-radio-p...

AWDL is such an amazing technology, it's understandable that Apple wants to keep it only for their devices as it gives them a noticeable advantage for quick stuff sharing.

> which is a proprietary peer-to-peer layer that runs alongside your existing WiFi connection without dropping it. It uses a time-sliced channel-hopping mechanism so the radio can serve both infrastructure WiFi and the direct peer link simultaneously.

Maybe a network nerd can chime in - is this implementation so difficult that it's unrealistic we'll see an OSS version?

There is an open standard for that which is included in Apple devices since the iPhone 15. google implements it since the pixel 3. It’s called NAN. There are no WiFi cards available for consumers to buy which expose that as part of their firmware sadly. But wpa_supplicant has implemented part of the standard.

This is misinformation, including most of the comments here, the majority of phones from 2014 support Wi-Fi Direct, and simultaneous group and station mode (2 BSS, yes even different channels). Even most Wi-Fi chips generally not just smartphones for a very long time. They stay connected to your home network.

When Quickshare drops your Wi-Fi connection, its not Direct anymore, that's just soft AP from an error, and if that doesn't work, it fallback to Bluetooth. Bluetooth is used for provisioning as well.

The only reason why many apps don't use it is because of buggy implementation, some phones require a full restart after using Wi-Fi Direct to fix connectivity issues, even Motorola's own product line with Smart Connect use it only with certain models, despite having Wi-Fi direct due to poor implementation (can be forced). They even have a white list of supported adapter for the Windows app since direct is used as well, can be unofficially force enabled for Mediatek based adapters (rare on some laptops).

Back in 2016 things were much stable on Android phones with Wi-Fi Direct, even with old Blackberry, there were many apps including file managers that used it before it was essentially dropped, even for onboarding/provisioning apps like HP printers...

Apple's Airdrop success is about gaining traction, in the era of Wi-Fi Direct or other methods, most people were not aware of such features, as it required an app to be installed, they used email/messaging, even when Airdrop was first introduced and preinstalled, it took years for the average person to use it.

> It uses a time-sliced channel-hopping mechanism so the radio can serve both infrastructure WiFi and the direct peer link simultaneously.

This is really nothing special as 802.11 implementations go, as it's pretty easy to do as long as you can control the physical channel for at least one side.

Many Windows, Linux, and Android devices have been supporthing this for years. It's usually called something like "simultaneous AP/STA mode".

FYI this is an LLM comment, and other replies point out inaccuracies…

also they use mDNS, which many programming languages, such as go, got it in their net library

Seems weird there is no 802.n variant to do this very popular thing

Fascinating! Thanks for breaking it down.

I thought airdrop also used bluetooth