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.
They weren't specifically required to drop AWDL, they were just required to implement WiFi-Aware in such a manner that neither technology had an advantage.
In theory Apple could've maintained both, but that seems like a waste of development time to me.
I doubt they would've had to implement any specific protocol if they had just opened up AWDL, but I suppose they'd rather keep that closed to maintain the ability to guard their walled garden in non-EU devices.
> In theory Apple could've maintained both, but that seems like a waste of development time to me.
They need Airdrop to work with phones who haven’t upgraded, so doesn’t feel like a waste to me. And they already have working AWDL code, so it’s just maintenance, probably not a ton of work.
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.
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.
That's true, I should have mentioned it did not use device-to-device communication. It was the best possible experience for the time though, BT was not viable and wifi direct did not exist. 3G averaged at maybe 10Mbps, and photos were 2 megapixels (if you had a camera at all), more than enough speed. We were mostly sharing URLs and contacts.
By faster I mean the initial connection, it was instant despite the server-based pairing, which made it feel even more magical. With AirDrop you sometimes experience quite a bit of signal hunting.
A comparable experience would be when you touch phones to share a contact with NFC, it was in that ballpark of responsiveness.
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
yes, "beaming" in the us was also used for quite a while. as in IR beam
japanese phones were buggy, feature packed monstrosities. a bunch of companies fighting to check as many boxes as they could. it's not a surprise that they got wiped out by an attempt to make a holistic internet communicator.
but for a while, there was nothing like them and their ability to get information on the internet
I wonder if this was driven by the Palm Pilots in the early 2000s. We beamed contacts, calendar entries, whole apps via IR. At trade shows exhibitors had terminals that would constantly send out contact informations via OBEX (?).
In the US (edit: and elsewhere!), "beaming" worked great between Apple Newton devices, including the pretty cool eMate 300 (an early Jony Ive creation, I just found on Wikipedia).
I remember being blown away by the Gameboy Colour IR link. You could use it to trade Pokemon. That makes a bit more sense now if sekigaisen was already a popular ecosystem.
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 would rewrite if the alternative is maintaining bad code for a long time. But yeah, it’s best to be pessimistic. And be really careful about changes. There are books written about the methods to use.
The lesson I retain from a similar endeavor is that you should document all the usecase of a module or a project before rewriting them. And that task can be as exhausting as formally verifying the module.
Yeah, it could be several weeks or even months before even writing a single line of code depending on size of project. Important to do, but PMs would be a hard to sell that to :(
(Ideally these things are written while the code is being written but let's be honest, we rarely keep those up to date)
> Waayy back in 2009 we had Bump [1], which allowed transfer between devices and later web apps as well
Over the Internet. There are dozens of such services, and none of them can compete with Airdrop.
The main point of Airdrop is that it doesn't need Internet connectivity and won't use any metered data (or, on recent iOS versions, at least if Wi-Fi Assist is turned off, I believe).
Just as important is the fact that there's no need to install any application – any Apple device comes with Airdrop preinstalled.
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.
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.
iMessage is very bad in certain circumstances, think if the recipient is on 3G or 4G it really compresses videos. It's not obvious and doesn't tell the recipient or offer an option so if you're working in video you keep being told "Can you make it higher res" when this happens
Stripping the metadata on a photo is probably a feature though. For privacy reasons the default should most likely be that location, device info etc are taken out of photos that might go viral or be shared beyond what the original user intended.
It depends, I do wish it was an option that the user can pick from. Quite often you get sent photos of you or an event you were at and you'd like the metadata to be preserved. For posting on social media, sure it's best to strip it.
There could probably be a niche market (until platforms implement the functionality) for enhancing the metadata of Whatsapp pictures from family & friends and guess it from the context. i.e. your auntie sending you now a picture of yourself 30 years ago which will show up as dated 2025 by default, which totally sucks.
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.
Connection speed, not transfer speed indeed – that was purely network dependent. In any case nobody was transferring 1GB files from their phones at the time :)
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.
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.
(N.B. The decision calls it "iOS 19" because it predates Apple announcing that "iOS 19" would actually be called iOS 26)
It is possible, I suppose, that Apple intended all along to release this feature with iOS 26. You'd have to be an Apple insider to know for sure. But the simpler explanation is that they did it because the EU told them to.
5.7.8. Implementation timing
(402) Apple should implement the measures required to enable the scenario of close-range
wireless file transfers while the receiving device has the relevant close-range wireless
file transfer solution open by 1 June 2026. Apple should implement all measures for
the features for close-range wireless file transfer solutions in the release of iOS 20,
and in any case by the end of 2026.
(§5.7 is 13 pages of exquisitely detailed requirements for Airdrop interop)
Given Apple's usual release timelines, June 2026 is a bit early for iOS 27 (what the ruling calls iOS 20). In between that, the fact that this is a pretty big piece of feature work, and the fact that they were forced to ship other parts by iOS 26, I find it likelier that Apple shipped this in iOS 26, rather than shipping it some time next year as a point release.
Also, you have to consider the timing. Google is shipping this functionality now, a couple of months after the iOS 26 release. It would be just plain weird for Google to ship a reverse-engineered implementation of Apple's old proprietary stack after Apple has definitely already shipped part of the new, interoperable stack.
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.
Is it really excellent? I mean, the game still FPS drops, when only one person in a multiplayer match is lagging. But maybe that could be attributed to engine problems, rather than network code issues.
The rest of the code seems not too great either, considering the humongous system requirements, compared to the historical versions of the game. If you ask me, they could have kept it 2D sprites and it would have been completely fine. But they had to go 3D ...
That's just been my experience. LAN especially seems rock solid, once it's going. All sorts of issues getting it to connect sometimes. Definitely lag sometimes online.
I'm with you on the system requirements bloat. Really sad honestly. That said, I don't think the engine is more 3D than it used to be, is it? I believe it's still isometric 2D with 3D physics. Could definitely (definitively?) be wrong though.
Hmmm that would mean incredibly bad performance though. I mean, there is even a machine performance test, before you can play online, because the game is too heavy for many machines these days, while running 8p games just fine back in the day on waaaaay weaker hardware than most people have these days. What then is causing the massive performance regressions? Maybe resolution increase?
To me it looks kinda 3D, when you pane left right and look at buildings, but I could be wrong and that could be merely some effect, that also takes some on the fly calculation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Your reply makes sense in a vacuum, but in reality we have the context of having seen Apple comply with regulation maliciously before, so we do know for sure that there's no macOS in the sdk because they weren't forced to by regulation.
> we do know for sure that there's no macOS in the sdk because they weren't forced to by regulation.
Unless you have insider knowledge, we don't know anything for sure here. Apple isn't a person. Apple doesn't have a single, consistent opinion when it comes to openness and EU regulation. (And even a person can change their mind.) All we know is that some teams at apple responded in the past to some EU regulation with malicious compliance. That doesn't tell us for sure what apple will do here.
Apple is 165 000 people. That's a lot of people. A lot more people than comment regularly on HN, and look at us! We don't agree about anything. I'm sure plenty of apple's employees hate EU regulation. And plenty more would love to opensource everything apple does.
That sort of inconsistency is exactly what we see across apple's product line. The Swift programming language is opensource. But SwiftUI is closed source. Webkit and FoundationDB are opensource. But almost everything on iOS is closed source. Apple sometimes promotes open standards - like pushing Firewire, USB and more recently USB-C - which they helped to design. But they also push plenty of proprietary standards that they keep under lock and key. Like the old 20-pin ipod connector, that companies had to pay money to apple to be allowed to use in 3rd party products. Or Airdrop. Or iMessage. AFS (apple filesystem) is closed source. But its also incredibly well documented. My guess is the engineers responsible want to support 3rd party implementations of AFS but for some reason they're prohibited from open-sourcing their own implementation.
We don't know anything for sure here. For my money, there's even odds in a year or two this API quietly becomes available on macos, watchos and tvos as well. If you "know for sure" that won't happen, lets make a bet at 100-1 odds. If you're sure, its free money for you.
> Apple is 165 000 people. That's a lot of people. A lot more people than comment regularly on HN
How do you know the HN numbers? I’m not doubting you, I’m curious about the data.
> and look at us! We don't agree about anything.
At the same time, anyone can join HN. There’s no “culture fit” or anything like that. It is possible to have a larger difference of ideas in a smaller pool of people.
Again, what’s the source of the data? Anyone can throw around vague numbers. “A few million” and “a small fraction” provide no useful information for the context.
but if airdrop as of OS26 uses wifi aware, and the proprietary awdl version has been shuttered due to the eu regulation, how come devices on that software version can still airdrop to older devices?
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.
I read the comment several times, and I can't figure out your intent, or the message, because of how much it's coded in doublespeak. That might also be what trips others up.
I didn't catch on to that at all. I even wrote my own comment, but seeing your reaction to the other guys' comments, I have re-read your original, and frankly, couldn't figure it out. I have asked ChatGPT and it decoded your intent correctly, and even seeing that, I couldn't reconcile it with the comment itself.
They say that a lot of communication is lost over text. I'm sure I could have caught the sarcasm if we spoke in real life, but in this textual form, it was completely lost to me, and it seems that for the other commenters as well.
>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.
I wonder if Google is adding metadata as well. Otherwise there does seem to be the problem of, for example, threats being AirDropped in a public place.
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.
They would seem to contain identifiers as law enforcement have been able to follow up on instances where there has been airdropping of perverse images, but as noted by others the files don't include names.
The problem with airdrop (and likely why the 10 minute setting now exists) is that it includes a preview image as part of the notification request.
So other than being able to subject someone to perverse images, preview images have also been used in state-sponsored zero-click attacks to infect the phones of their targets. While that vector seems to be muted for now, the 10 minute setting provides a layer of defence against both potential future zero-clicks and receiving unsolicited previews images.
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.
No. Credit card transactions cannot check for name or billing a part from the zip code. Also the zip code validation only works in certain countries like the US, and Canada.
The way to validate that works is Visa 3DS or MasterCard 3D Secure. Those sent an OTP from the issuer to the cardholder on the issuer database, usually an email or SMS. The issuer of the card is the only who really knows the owner of the card.
They get compared yes, and it feeds into the fraud likelihood score that the merchant gets sent. And then usually chooses to ignore, because they make more from going ahead with the transaction than from stopping because it's suspicious, but it makes it easier for the credit card industry to put the liability on them.
Number, date (though I never bothered to check if it's actually checked, besides stupid frontend shenanigans when I couldn't enter it because it had a whole whooping month ahead of the current date) and CVC.
As soon as I learned what BANK NAME is acceptable name I used it almost everywhere.
I’ve never heard of this. Are you saying I could enter “MyLocal Bank” as the payer name instead of my own when transacting online with a credit card? This seems like the kind of fact that should be essential privacy knowledge if true!
This might not work super well if your package is crossing border either. Sure it's your billing address and not your shipping address, but sometimes they are all the same.
Well, for example, I can set Stripe Radar to hard match the name on the CC, for example. Very granular control is possible, but doing stuff like checking zip codes, names leads to false negatives and isn't worth it, in my experience.
When you create a ZIP, the extended attributes are saved to separate files. When you copy them to a FAT filesystem they are also saved to separate files.
Interesting, but now this information is no longer attached to the original file and you need to manually include it, when distributing the file. Also it is now kind of obvious, that there is not only the file itself in the ZIP file.
It’s not obvious if you are only using macOS, because macOS hides all of these extra files it creates. It’s only obvious if you use Windows or Linux. But of courses the chances of a typical macOS user also using Windows or Linux is very low.
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.
This makes no sense as an explanation. They changed the architecture not to infringe on the patents. So the patents are not stopping them from opening up now.
The code was added to Android with Android 4.0 back in 2011.
You can check for WiFi Direct networks manually in Settings > Network & internet > Internet > Network preferences > Wifi Direct. If you live in a city, you can probably find one or two printers in the neighbourhood advertising a WiFi Direct channel you can use to print over.
I’m using FilePizza when I need it, saw it on HN recently. All this AI magic allegedly taking our jobs, but we still can’t transfer files from one device to another, or print a document reliably.
I've been very happy with Blip. My use case is to share processed photos from my MacBook to my Pixel to use for Social sharing. It's super-fast, especially when the devices are on the same LAN.
To continue to continue the thread relaysecret.com and relaysecret.com/tunnel
Found it on hn years ago, still use it all the time. Perfect replacement for Firefox send, rip
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.
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.
Does it use internet to open up the connection? Because I vividly remember the share screen not even finding the other device (and vice versa). Could also be extremely slow internet being worse than no connection at all
Android didn't have a way to share files between them for the longest time. Initially there was Beam but it never worked. The first semi-reliable way to exchange files between two android phones, without using a third party utility, was Nearby Share dates from 2020.
So yeah, it's a low bar, but one that only Apple bothered to clear from the get go apparently.
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.
Even expecting state on a single device to remain is a pretty tall order. Something randomly happens at least once a week which forces me to close all my browser tabs, either the OS or the browser restarts. Often while I'm working.
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.
> 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.
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.
+1 for Brother. Works flawlessly without any drivers. The only pain point is the setup - I have the cheapo laser one without any screen, and AFAIK you need Windows software for the initial WiFi setup. After this, it's not needed anymore.
Printer manufacturers make it difficult. There are standard printing protocols but printer manufacturers will disable those until you've installed their ad-filled, subscription-filled app. If it weren't for the industrial sabotage, just plugging a USB printer into a computer or clicking "add printer" from a network browser would just work out of the box.
Mopria pretty much universally fixes printing on all competent printers by smoothing over the rough edges of IPP.
> I mean that to protect the proverbial technology-challenged grandma it should be the default.
Yes, I agree.
> And that it should even s,http://.*,,g them out.
No. Links are very useful and constantly present in conversation and manually written into messages. Do you seriously propose to basically ban them by default? Also I don't want the MUA to censor messages, that would also lead to a lot of confusion.
If anything, they could not render them as hyperlinks by default, but stripping them out, no.
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.
No, not at all. Someone even implemented AirDrop in Python before[1]. In fact, nothing ever needs such special hardware. It's a decision of the implementer if they'd like to get fancy and rely on such hardware in their implementation to change its security profile, but the iPhone at the other end or any Apple infrastructure would be none the wiser - they just see that they're getting appropriately signed or encrypted, and neither knows nor cares how that came to be. Use of a hardware security module would just make the process more tamper resistant but would not otherwise change the outcome.
It requires WiFi active monitor mode, which is a standard chipset feature. Nothing related to custom silicon, secure enclave, hardware acceleration or other such shenanigans being brought up in the current conversation, and nothing that most android phones wouldn't fully support.
No, OWL only appears to have specific driver requirements, namely that they expose to userspace functionality that any remotely modern WiFi chip should already have.
Yeah, I saw that. I'm pretty sure that's a statement more about the drivers than the underlying hardware. Open-source drivers often have more limited feature support than the underlying hardware. I doubt anyone is producing WiFi chips that cannot transmit arbitrary software-constructed WiFi frames, or capture and relay to software all the frames they hear, and ACK frames as needed while doing so. But it's very easy to imagine that some of those capabilities would not be publicly documented, or not enabled with the default firmware provided to end users. Those limitations that hinder Linux end-users tinkering with their machines don't necessarily apply to an OS vendor with a deep partnership with the relevant hardware vendors.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You realize that you can copy files gl and from other providers like Google Drive, Dropbox etc from the files app on iOS just like you do on any GUI and you can also copy files from the iPhone by just plugging in a USB C mass storage device?
Never owned an iPhone, but I have familiarity. Here's Apple's instructions for "exporting" your photos from iPhone. Note: it does not say plug the iphone in and drag the photos from the "Photo" folder to your external device. It says this:
> Export photos and videos to an external storage device
> You can export photos and videos you took on your iPhone directly to an external drive, a memory card, or other storage device.
> Note: For photos and videos that have been edited, the unmodified original version will be exported.
> Connect your iPhone to the storage device using the Lightning or USB-C connector, or connect the device directly to your iPhone.
> Go to the Photos app on your iPhone.
> Select the photos and videos you want to export.
> Tap the Share button, then tap Export Unmodified Original.
> Tap your storage device (below Locations), then tap Save.
Note that you have to request permission from Apple's app before you can actually export the data. The filesystem doesn't gate you this way.
So here's a question: can you export modified versions of photos that have been edited? Well, that seems to be tough. Searching around, you find wild discussions like this: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8567773?sortBy=rank
This is the kind of shenanigans I'm referring to. No access to just copy data from the app. Android has a similar issue with apps, but at least the filesystem is a first class citizen on Android. That is, I can simply copy any photos directly off my phone like it's USB mass storage.
It’s asking for permission on the device because there are real threats that you plug up your phone to an untrusted device thinking it is just a dumb charging port and it can extricate your data.
As far as why you can’t export your edited photos, is that iOS doesn’t actually exit your photos. It applies the edits from what I can tell as a separate “filter” that’s stored as metadata so you can undo your edits. How do you export your edits in a cross platform way? Would you rather have destructive edits? Maybe you would. But either way there are tradeoffs.
And files have a different data store than a photo.
You just plug any mass storage device into your iOS device and it shows up in the Files app and you copy and paste files like you would in the Finder or Explorer. In fact, in the Files app, if you have a third party storage service like Google Drive or Dropbox, they also show up as location in Files along with iCloud. Meaning you can copy directly from Google Drive to your mass storage device.
You can’t do that with any random “file explorer” on Android - ie a consolidated location for local storage, cloud storage from 3rd party providers, network connections, and mass storage.
Yeah, I get it. I don't want any of that, I just want a filesystem.
I'll take care of cloud storage with SyncThing (or whatever) -- I'm the kind of guy that values being able to choose the parts. I don't buy "cold medicine", I buy ibuprofen, diphenhydramine, pseudoephedrine or whatever else I decide, and I'll dose each based on my symptoms. Because that's just better than some prepackaged thing. And I do the exact same thing with computing. Works great. But Apple fights.
The whole world of mobile computing is actively fighting giving the customers the ability to compose their tools, which strips away user agency, and creates all these issues with "big tech" being monopolies and locking users in. This is at the root of what the DMA is about, I think.
Yes I’m sure “you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.”
With iCloud, if I drop my phone in the ocean by mistake, I can walk into the Apple Store, buy another phone, log in and my new phone looks and acts like my old phone with all of the bookmarks, icons, app data, settings etc being restored.
How so? I want my backups to actually backup everything. No one cares about backups - they care about restores as the old saying goes.
If I can’t in fact throw my phone in the ocean when I’m away from my computer, go buy another phone, log in and everything is automatically restored, it’s a poor solution
Despite others thinking you’re crazy, I think you are right. I remember the start of the smartphone era where many of my relatives switched to iPhone because "you know where the pictures are going and where to find them". The worst offender was my dad that had a Samsung phone running windows phone 6 (with an actual start menu) where you had to dig through folders to find jpeg files.
Desktop OSs are the worst for mixing random system files with the users own documents. Theres a better balance now where the “Files” app has your documents, downloaded stuff and similar, while system and app data is hidden.
Isn't that pretty much just Windows? That basically never occurs on Linux and it's not common on macOS, either. All the garbage I have on my work computer (a Mac) in ~/Documents is stuff that OneDrive synced over from when I used to have a Windows computer there. (If I could turn the OneDrive feature that takes over ~/Documents and ~/Downloads, I would.)
Linux software is notorious for spewing crap all over the user's home directory. Delete everything inside your /home/name and see how well the system still works. On iOS/iPadOS nothing happens other than not having the documents you saved in there.
I'm not sure there even is a good place where programs can store their internal system files without requiring root other than mixed in with the user Home.
> I'm not sure there even is a good place where programs can store their internal system files without requiring root other than mixed in with the user Home.
You are right. I see a lot of applications putting stuff into /var/run/user/<uid>/, but this is mostly ephemeral runtime data, notably sockets. And of course systemd has service units there, which don't seem temporary at all, but it's systemd, so whatever... .
The correct way for what I intend would be /var/lib/user/<uid>/, but yes this does not exist on my host. But I honestly don't see why non-ephemeral per user data shouldn't be put into /home. It is definitely user-specific, under the control of the user, instead of the OS, and when you want to move your user to another host (or sync it), you definitely want to include that data as well, so putting it across the OS filesystem sounds kind of dirty to me.
I think the systemd units in /run are indeed ephemeral, and indicate units that are active. If they have permanent counterparts (some units, like transient timer units, don't have them), you'll find them under /etc/systemd or /lib/systemd for system units and ~/.local/share/systemd or ~/.config/systemd for user units.
> But I honestly don't see why non-ephemeral per user data shouldn't be put into /home
I think I agree— as long as the conventions are clear, I think it's reasonable to have some hidden dirs under $HOME set aside for configuration and cache and so on.
Maybe there's value in exposing a single directory as the root of a sandbox for user files, so users have to go farther out of their way to screw things up, especially depending on your audience. Maybe a decade from now Linux desktops will have something like this, because most apps will run sandboxed in Flatpak, unable to write to the root of $HOME. (Idrk how that's organized, though— maybe apps are just allowed to edit "their" dotfiles without modifying their location.)
But I'm not sure that obscuring configuration data's place in the filesystem in that way is really desirable or necessary. I doubt most users inspect or think about hidden directories on Unix-likes unless they're looking for them anyway.
Yes and no. Some older conventions for dotfiles are a bit messy in that they're not necessarily contained under top-level directories like ~/.config or ~/.local, but the hijacking of non-hidden directories for contents unrelated to their purposes, like using ~/Documents for game saves, is basically unheard of (except for some ports of Windows games that retain this bad habit).
> On iOS/iPadOS nothing happens other than not having the documents you saved in there.
That is, frankly, a ridiculous test for the issue under discussion. Even if everything was stored under a top-level subdirectory set aside for application data in a perfectly orderly way, nuking $HOME would still break things.
Besides all that, hidden directories in the root of ~ are conventional¹ places to store application config files and so on, and can't be mistaken for conventional places to store documents. On most Linux-based operating systems, the conventional place to store documents is (obviously) ~/Documents, which is created ahead of time for all users. That folder doesn't generally end up polluted with things that aren't documents.
> On iOS/iPadOS nothing happens other than not having the documents you saved in there.
If you delete /var/mobile or any of the things that $HOME points to in the context of some app, you'll definitely lose app settings.
The app sandboxing on iOS does something nice by sort of forcing app configuration data to live within conventional directories, but none of that is captured in the "what if you delete ~" test. (The fact that $HOME isn't really directly exposed to the user sort of does; the local files you're comparing to $HOME on Linux are actually $HOME/Media on iOS.)
That's the thing, this was the very beginning of the smartphone era, 2007-2009. UX was not fleshed out yet. Conventions neither. Simple gallery apps were an Apple and iPhone thing.
There were cases where phones were not consistent. Pictures from the camera, or saved from MMS, or saved from the Web, or screenshots, did not all go in the same place. Just like you would have on a desktop :) I don't remember that well the pre-2010 android, but it had some issues too.
Even to this day, WhatsApp saves photos to the gallery, but in its own album. At least on iOS those are part of the regular gallery so you'll always find them (an album is just a "tag" on the photo). Android has a dedicated album too, but the picture set is distinct from the main picture gallery. So are screenshots. That's more control and power, but utterly confusing for older people. Younger relatives are fine, older fail to navigate around this and find "the picture your auntie sent to me through whatsapp". Yup, it's there, but not in the main camera roll.
This is what I mean by "you know where the pictures are going".
PS: Apple botched the UX of the gallery app in the last two iOS versions so much that even I, a young tech-inclined person, loses my way around. So do my relatives. They're sorta catching up /s
A file system and its files are a very simple abstraction that lets us organize these exact things.
I understand that some people get confused and overwhelmed by a directory structure, but I see that as an education problem, not a UX problem. I was taught all of this in elementary and middle school computer classes in the '90s and early '00s. Having this knowledge early on made me less afraid of my computer, made it feel less like a magical black box, and gave me the confidence to learn more complex topics on my own.
Computers become way more capable when the people using them understand fundamentals like directory structures and command line usage. I don't think either of these things are as difficult to learn as reading, writing, and arithmetic (especially if you already have a base level education in those three things).
If more "everyday people" just had a little bit more knowledge about these things, they would be able to do way more with their computers with less of a reliance on proprietary solutions that funnel them down whatever path makes someone else the most money.
its a UX probpem insofar as service providers will decide that since they give you a view over the file system, thats enough.
i want file system access, but as a power tool. the 50 clicks through different folders is irrelevant to my most common 5 patterns of use. those should be a single click, or 0 clicks
I tried out zoxide and fzf ctrl-r history on linux (zsh) recently. Game changers.
Where is zoxide for my phone? Why is there so little innovation?
Trillion dollar companies can't come up with a single new thing. Or rather, won't come up with a single new thing because they're just useless rent seekers.
One reason I'll never own an apple device, and prefer buying more expensive more open competition. Its just a red line - I own the device by law, if you bend backwards to prevent me from using it via ways that it supports by principle, your product doesn't exist for me.
Barely... the iPadOS brand was introduced in 2019, the European Commission proposed the DMA in 2020, and even prior to this there were obvious noises being made in Europe with regards to future regulation. Maybe its coincidence, but the timing still lines up for this being a response to the threat of EU changes.
Law drafting in Europe doesn't happen behind closed doors and typically even has consultations with the companies affected by it. It wasn't unreleased only because it wasn't signed yet.
That also could have been from the phone manufacturer OR from the carrier.
This is why I've avoided non Pixel phones since the Pixel5 came out. None of that 2 or 3 apps for the same thing so everybody can get their ad cut payout.
Whenever I'm forced to help with iPhones, I'm baffled how hard everything is. And I had my own iPhones previously. Download a file, unpack it and open in an app is an exercise is frustration, and that's just hoping that I will find the file due it being newest. Working with directories and old files properly, like on Android, I'm not sure if its even possible on iOS. And all that with a crappy keyboard with hidden numbers and special symbols, making searching even harder.
I love Android but Android does that too. Apps have their internal storage area which you can't access unfortunately (not without root anyway). Nor system files.
There's a difference between "can't see 'special' folders" & "can't access anything but the app-specific storage". iOS loves the latter, while Android lets you organize files mostly normally even if doing highly stupid/discouraging things for power users & some app developers making questionable non-default choices.
The history lesson is appreciated but how does this relate to the current state of the stock file explorer that ships with the OS? I’m using my phone now and not ten years ago.
edit: oh, I think I get it. My original post wasn't intended to be read "iOS invented the file explorer, has Android also a file explorer app" (which would be silly, of course) but "when Files app released, the AOSP file explorer that commonly ships as the default was lacking, has this improved (caught up to Files app)"
When I had an iPhone (a few months ago), there was no way for apps to see files in the filesystem. I wanted to play some music and I had to copy it over to each of the music player apps separately. Is that not the case any more?
Am I supposed to be mad about them not supporting a feature during a time when I didn’t use iOS or is this somehow supposed to impact my current day use of Files app?
Try connecting to a WebDAV server on File. It's possible but it's shitty. And try using Syncthing on iOS to keep your files synced across devices without having them uploaded to servers you don't control.
Also, on Android, you can choose any file explorer. You're stuck with Files and it sucks (but it looks nice).
The one major issue is that it doesn’t work inside other apps. If I save something in Word, it pops up the standard File dialog and every storage provider available for my iOS device - Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, iCloud Drive, local storage, network drives, and locally connected mass storage devices are available.
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.
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.
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.
Lets just zoom into a single use case. The ability of the user to buy a 3rd Party watch that integrates with their phone:
* Apple doesn't allow 3rd Party watches to send text messages. The Apple Watch is allowed to do so.
* Apple doesn't allow 3rd Party to take actions on notifications. The Apple Watch is allowed to do so.
* If you want to use the internet on your watch, you must: 1) install a 3rd party app, 2) keep that app open. Closing the app closes the connection to the internet. The Apple Watch does not have this restriction.
* 3rd Party watches cannot detect if you are using your phone. This means that they will notify users of notifications even if the user is looking at the notification. The Apple Watch does not have this restriction.
* Apple does not have ‘interprocess communication’(IPC) like Android.
* Apple restricts making 3rd Party App Stores. This makes it difficult to make a community of people making watch faces.
All points come from Pebble's blog [1]. This is just a single type of integration that Apple intentionally makes difficult, there are many others (e.g. 3rd Party Photos App, ...)
No, that's not true - the change was that you could only install software from verified developers, not only from the app store, and now they've partially walked that back too and "are building a new advanced flow that allows experienced users to accept the risks of installing software that isn't verified." ( https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/11/android-de... )
Like sharing your WLAN. It works great between iPhones, if you know how it works and the preconditions are fulfilled (it's undiscoverable). You can't share with Android devices by showing them a QR code – which I would consider the "usual" way and which is easy to do on Android devices.
Edit:
Here is the procedure I was talking about and all prerequisites for it to work:
iOS hotspots are discoverable by non-Apple devices if you have "Allow Others to Join" enabled and have the Personal Hotspot settings panel open on the iOS device. Otherwise, it's hidden to help prevent unintended connection attempts.
It has never worked for me on iOS. Everyone kept saying "I can just share the password" but the prompt never popped up, and there was no way to do anything.
IIRC it only works if you are on their contact list. And I think you need to be in the settings app. Something like that. It's a handy feature but Apple could make it easier to understand, and they could do way better communicating why it isn't working, when it does not work.
let me list some things I can do on android which I cannot do on iOS:
* Install real mobile firefox, including installing firefox addons I've built for myself. Firefox on iOS is a safari skin
* Install web browser security updates without also updating my entire OS. On Android, firefox is an app. on iOS, safari is a part of the OS that cannot be updated independently
* Install an open source app my friend built without paying $100/year or having to reload it every 7 days
* Build and install an app without owning a macbook or other macOS device, just using linux
* Filter notifications to my garmin smartwatch by-app
* Have reliably working file-syncing (i.e. syncthing for iOS) because background tasks are something you can do well in android, and barely at all in iOS
* Have access to the source code to debug and fix problems
* Have the ability to flash my own custom kernel / rom (not all android devices, but many)
.... Really, not being able to write and install my own app without paying apple $100, and without owning a macbook is the big dealbreaker, followed by iOS restricting APIs needed to do all sorts of things like proper notification handling, proper NFC, etc etc.
It amazes me that so many people on the "hacker news" forum are okay with their primary computing device being wildly hostile to the hacker spirit, to the desire to tinker around for fun and learn and hack on things.
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.
Or they could have figured out a new version of MTP that supports basic features like concurrent access and normal metadata. Or they could have gone for SMB/NFS over a virtual network link. Anything but this horrible interface they've doubled down on.
It always kind of sucked though. You had to go through the pairing process, and then the transfer was incredibly slow since Bluetooth is very low bandwidth.
It’s still a classic Apple “the open standard sucks so build a proprietary one that’s great but only on iPhone”
You could do it even before phones came with Bluetooth via Infrared. Granted, the two phones had to be placed perfectly for the IR sensors to connect, if you moved them the file transfer would break.
Bluetooth was a huge upgrade because you no longer needed to do that.
i think microsoft really messed up. windows phone could have been huge. i thought they were going to be. i guess things like this didn't help. they really didn't play their cards right.
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.
Phones other than iPhones can still share files with each other and with computers using Bluetooth. But people instead use apps like WhatsApp or e-mail for file transfers, even in places where iPhone's market penetration is near zero.
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.
They won't, they'll just do another Green-Bubble/Blue-Bubble shenanigan to signal when Apple royalty is transferring a file with an unwashed Android peasant via a gimped experience.
> Developers will be able to integrate alternative solutions to Apple’s AirDrop and AirPlay services on the iPhone. As a result, iPhone users will be able to choose from different and innovative services to share files with other users and cast media content from their iPhones to TVs.
So you posted a citation supposedly refuting my comment then when you are called out about it instead of admitting you misinterpreted your own citation, you say “look somewhere else”…
So instead of admitting you were wrong and that DMA did indeed strongarm Apple into doing this, you're doing what? Arguing I should've given you a different quote with that info instead of a primary source I've already linked to you?
Well first you were wrong - and your quote shows that you didn’t understand what you were quoting. The EU never forced Apple to have interoperability with AirDrop. It had to support the standard WiFI protocol to allow other apps to be installed on the iPhone that could duplicate its functionally. It’s “weird” that you don’t see the difference.
It’s also weird that you could take the time to deflect and respond twice and not find the quote that backs up your (false) assertion.
But this works with the existing airdrop client on the iOS side right? Did Apple change airdrop to use wifi aware, and now Google can build the airdrop protocol on Android?
On every Apple interoperability thread this argument comes up and at this point I'm convinced it's part of some coordinated effort; surely no one can be that clueless to actually believe this, especially on a technical forum?
AirDrop is a peer-to-peer protocol, both the recipient and initiator need to explicitly take action, and even in Apple's implementation provides no authentication (recipient device is chosen by name, which anyone can change in their settings app). There is no way the existence of this Android client would reduce Airdrop security on iOS.
Do you also believe that TLS between an Apple device and a Windows device not secure either, since the Windows device uses a different, non-Apple-sanctioned TLS implementation, and the mere existence of which would somehow weaken Apple's TLS stack?
First time I hear about Google tech being insecure or not private. Sure they siphon all the info THEMSELVES, but never have I heard about them implementing insecure protocols.
> but never have I heard about them implementing insecure protocols.
That's because they don't. Google takes security seriously. There's a reason GrapheneOS is only supported on Pixel devices currently as well, because of certain hardware security features.
Nothing you do with Google is private from Google but it's certainly designed to belong only to Google, your data is one of their most important assets. Of course they are going to secure it and prevent others besides themselves from getting or using it.
It's the most common misconception with Google, that they "sell your information." They don't, they never have. They use your info, aggregated with all other Google users, to sell targeting for ads. They don't sell the actual data.
> Nothing you do with Google is private from Google but it's certainly designed to belong only to Google
The same also goes for Apple, although Apple doesn't monetize your data as much so they collect less. They'll suck up all kinds of data out of your devices but will strictly protect that data from third party applications any way they can. They're also willing to use that protection to prevent interoperability or integration with third-party devices.
The difference for me is in the business model, and the fact that Apple offers true E2E encryption for photos while Google doesn't. If Google ever made their own version of Advanced Data Protection for Pixel phones, it'd be a wash.
Apple does pose more private defaults, though they will easily steer your towards "make backups encrypted with a key we also know in case you lose your password", which isn't much more private than Google's proposition.
When Google announced their AI hardware features, I was hoping they they'd implement the same offline/encrypted photo indexing that iOS does, rather than shoving everything through the cloud. Unfortunately, Google Photos seems as bad as ever.
On the other hand, setting up automatic backups and photo sync towards a self-hosted Immich/Photoprism instance is a lot easier on Android than on iOS in my experience, despite Google's reluctance to grant storage permissions to apps.
Google does actually have a kind of extended protection (https://developer.android.com/privacy-and-security/advanced-...), but that feeds more data to Google rather than less: it basically has you trust Google to protect you, by having Google pre-scan your browsing and locking down your account. If you're American, that may be worth it if you trust Google enough. It's a combination of Lockdown Mode and Advanced Protection Mode on iOS.
Yeah. They sell access to you, so an advertiser can tell Google "I want this shown to a mid-thirties tech worker living in SF who likes x,y,z and frequents traveling to q" and Google will show you their ad.
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.”
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.
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.
I have upgraded dropbox and google accounts and also a VPS, so it wouldn't be hard for me. But for people who aren't big fucking nerds, nothing exists that's as easy as that. Email's limit is crazy low.
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
~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
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.
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]
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.
Wi-Fi Aware has been supported by Android since Android 8.0. However, I am a bit unsure if Android and iOS devices can communicate via Wi-Fi Aware with the SDKs that Apple released? They have two example apps, one for the DeviceDiscoveryUI and one for the AccessorySetupKit. However, would it be possible to pair/connect to an Android device? Would be great if someone had an example app.
AirDrop sometimes just doesn’t work and gives you zero tools to debug why. In my experience airdrop between phones seem to work fine (probably helped by UWB), but involving Macs makes it an unreliable mess. Staring at the “there is no one nearby to share with” screen with little you can do. Bonus points when it’s asymmetrical: the Mac finds the iPhone just fine but the iPhone cannot find the Mac. When the device is finally found, tapping on it does not cause the other device to present any UI whatsoever to accept the transfer, and the sending devices simply displays “Declined” after a timeout. And if your Mac has multiple user accounts (traditional UNIX-style security boundary) it is undefined which user account will receive the notification to accept the transfer.
I haven't had AirDrop fail on me, but I have had other similar issues with Apple's "ecosystem" integration.
And that's the frustrating part of using Apple. When it works, it works great. When it doesn't work, you have zero visibility into what's happening or what went wrong, and no tools to debug. It's just a magic black box and you are SOL.
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.
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.
So does this constitute an example that the liberal ideal of companies competing for the best product -with no or minimal amount of public money forced to go this way for public development- ends up becoming basically a miserable and lacking experience for end users during decades? (admittedly it sounds to me like if private companies had invented TCP-IP, the consequences would basically be terrible connectivity products nowadays)
I don't necessarily think so. It doesn't have to be this way. The problem is big tech doesn't have any incentive to compete to make the best product because there's no market pressure to do so.
We've failed, over the past ~25+ years to do any meaningful trust busting and allowed monopolies and duopolies to abuse their market positions and destroy any potential competitors.
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.
These rulings only affect third-party apps, not AirDrop. Apple is not required to stop using AWDL for system apps, and is also not required to allow third-party implementations of the AirDrop protocol. They are however required to implement a mechanism allowing competing solutions to automatically trigger a prompt to install their own iOS apps, but the deadline for that isn't until next year and they have not yet shipped it.
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.
My son regularly borrows my iPhone 14 Pro for shooting video, and I inevitably have to do a large AirDrop transfer to him of all his footage. We usually see about 10 GB per minute, which is really fast
If it was a few large files as opposed to many small ones, this is totally believable. iPhones have Wi-Fi 6E chips, and an ad hoc network where the devices are right next to each other can actually reach the theoretical max speed of the protocol (as opposed to real-world connections to a base station, which never do). I've never measured it precisely but I've transferred ~1 GB disk images over AirDrop in a couple seconds.
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 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.
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.
Can anyone else implement this, or is it only a google play services thing?
I don't like how android's local share system seems to need to be tied to a google account to work, and from some limited research earlier it won't work without play services installed.
It's 2025 and finally got back to Bluetooth file sharing OBEX that was supported in Android 2 in 2009, and the Palm 3 in 1998 (using IR), as long as you buy another new phone
Has anyone gotten this to work? I tried with my Pixel 10 and my wife's iPhone 14, and her phone said something like "You can't do this with Android phones".
The iPhone needs iOS 26 and the Pixel needs the software updates Google started rolling out yesterday. You may need to update everything/wait for the magical A/B testing algorithm to permit you to update.
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.
The Wi-Fi radio's firmware has to have special support for communicating via AWDL while staying connected to an access point. The blog post does say that they plan to expand support to other devices, though.
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.
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.
Things have inverted: iOS now has a user-visible filesystem apps can expose their data in, while current Android versions model everything around "documents" sourced from "document providers" with major performance and functionality limitations.
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.
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.
I've had the same issue as a more recent iOS convert.
I remembering looking into it and I think there's actually two forms of airdrop - one is local only (I think it negotiates over Bluetooth then does actual transfer over a direct WiFi connection). The other is a fallback or something and goes over cellular.
And for some reason it seems to always want to fall back to cellular when you have one bar of shit 3G in the middle of nowhere and are trying to send your friend 2 feet away a shitload of photos from your trip.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Only tangentially related, but I was greatly disappointed when I learned that iPhones cannot read contact information from an NFC chip. I help my son program the chip, and then we realized that a significant fraction of the population would not be able to read it.
KDE Connect makes this work between all combinations Windows/macOS/Linux and iOS/Android: https://kdeconnect.kde.org/
Unfortunately, due to privacy restrictions on modern versions of both iOS and Android, updating the shared clipboard with things copied from the phone has to be done manually....
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 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.
Isn't that just Wi-Fi Direct? Which I understand establishes a separate, dedicated temporary network for that task over Wi-Fi, with the two devices being the only ones connected to it? Isn't that still two machines on the same network via Wi-Fi, merely separate from prior networks they may have been connected to? How can you claim there is no local network or that the device doesn't need to be on Wi-Fi at all? Surely they need both a local network and Wi-Fi? Or are you referring to Bluetooth-only transfers?
In any case, my point obviously wasn't that I my home router has to see the packets, but whether/when servers on the internet become involved...
It's "WiFi-Aware" which seems like a related standard. I think the difference is it handles the discovery and secure connection part, then once established its like WiFi-Direct. Because of this I think it's unlikely.
And Apple devices can do this while simultaneously connected to another wifi network. Maybe Android does too. Which would make your concern more possible if it does this too!
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.
AirDrop doesn't open a network port, it creates a WiFi Aware advertisement and a WiFi Direct connection. However I thought this also should not need OS-level changes, just android.permission.NEARBY_WIFI_DEVICES permission.
AirDrop is based on AWDL, which is a proprietary protocol that requires low-level access to the Wi-Fi radio to implement. Apple told the EU that they have long-term plans to migrate from AWDL to the standard Wi-Fi Aware, but have not yet done so (and the EU did not require them to, only that they bring their Wi-Fi Aware support for third-party apps to feature parity).
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.
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.
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.
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.
They were required to drop AWDL, yes. They had to reimplement AirDrop.
https://www.ditto.com/blog/cross-platform-p2p-wi-fi-how-the-...
They weren't specifically required to drop AWDL, they were just required to implement WiFi-Aware in such a manner that neither technology had an advantage.
In theory Apple could've maintained both, but that seems like a waste of development time to me.
I doubt they would've had to implement any specific protocol if they had just opened up AWDL, but I suppose they'd rather keep that closed to maintain the ability to guard their walled garden in non-EU devices.
> In theory Apple could've maintained both, but that seems like a waste of development time to me.
They need Airdrop to work with phones who haven’t upgraded, so doesn’t feel like a waste to me. And they already have working AWDL code, so it’s just maintenance, probably not a ton of work.
They are not required to drop awdl, they just have to support wifi aware as well.
So does Mac OS support Wifi Aware now? I didn't think so, which is confusing if Airdrop still works between iOS and Mac OS.
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)
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.
That's true, I should have mentioned it did not use device-to-device communication. It was the best possible experience for the time though, BT was not viable and wifi direct did not exist. 3G averaged at maybe 10Mbps, and photos were 2 megapixels (if you had a camera at all), more than enough speed. We were mostly sharing URLs and contacts.
By faster I mean the initial connection, it was instant despite the server-based pairing, which made it feel even more magical. With AirDrop you sometimes experience quite a bit of signal hunting.
A comparable experience would be when you touch phones to share a contact with NFC, it was in that ballpark of responsiveness.
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
yes, "beaming" in the us was also used for quite a while. as in IR beam
japanese phones were buggy, feature packed monstrosities. a bunch of companies fighting to check as many boxes as they could. it's not a surprise that they got wiped out by an attempt to make a holistic internet communicator.
but for a while, there was nothing like them and their ability to get information on the internet
I wonder if this was driven by the Palm Pilots in the early 2000s. We beamed contacts, calendar entries, whole apps via IR. At trade shows exhibitors had terminals that would constantly send out contact informations via OBEX (?).
In the US (edit: and elsewhere!), "beaming" worked great between Apple Newton devices, including the pretty cool eMate 300 (an early Jony Ive creation, I just found on Wikipedia).
In 1993.
Microsoft Zune had the ability to send music wirelessly to other Zunes, it was called squirting
That's appalling. "Yo let me squirt you"
Somehow "squirting their users" perfectly defines Microsoft to this day
squirt me bro
My friends in school would send ringtones, wallpapers, and other small files through Bluetooth. It normally worked pretty well no matter the device.
I remember being blown away by the Gameboy Colour IR link. You could use it to trade Pokemon. That makes a bit more sense now if sekigaisen was already a popular ecosystem.
And in Pokemon Gold/Silver/Crystal on GameBoy Color you could send Mystery gifts via IR!
Someone even ported it to an emulator! https://shonumi.github.io/articles/art11.html
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 changed my thoughts on rewriting after reading this:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
PS: I just realized this article is older than some of the people here.
I would rewrite if the alternative is maintaining bad code for a long time. But yeah, it’s best to be pessimistic. And be really careful about changes. There are books written about the methods to use.
Wow! Not quite older than me, but my age was in the single digits :)
Thanks for sharing, it's always great to learn from folks who have been through it for literal decades.
The lesson I retain from a similar endeavor is that you should document all the usecase of a module or a project before rewriting them. And that task can be as exhausting as formally verifying the module.
Yeah, it could be several weeks or even months before even writing a single line of code depending on size of project. Important to do, but PMs would be a hard to sell that to :(
(Ideally these things are written while the code is being written but let's be honest, we rarely keep those up to date)
> Waayy back in 2009 we had Bump [1], which allowed transfer between devices and later web apps as well
Over the Internet. There are dozens of such services, and none of them can compete with Airdrop.
The main point of Airdrop is that it doesn't need Internet connectivity and won't use any metered data (or, on recent iOS versions, at least if Wi-Fi Assist is turned off, I believe).
Just as important is the fact that there's no need to install any application – any Apple device comes with Airdrop preinstalled.
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.
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.
> iMessage isn't so bad
iMessage is very bad in certain circumstances, think if the recipient is on 3G or 4G it really compresses videos. It's not obvious and doesn't tell the recipient or offer an option so if you're working in video you keep being told "Can you make it higher res" when this happens
Stripping the metadata on a photo is probably a feature though. For privacy reasons the default should most likely be that location, device info etc are taken out of photos that might go viral or be shared beyond what the original user intended.
It depends, I do wish it was an option that the user can pick from. Quite often you get sent photos of you or an event you were at and you'd like the metadata to be preserved. For posting on social media, sure it's best to strip it.
There could probably be a niche market (until platforms implement the functionality) for enhancing the metadata of Whatsapp pictures from family & friends and guess it from the context. i.e. your auntie sending you now a picture of yourself 30 years ago which will show up as dated 2025 by default, which totally sucks.
Your comment reminded me of this:
https://theyseeyourphotos.com/
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
Bump was like magic.
The only app I have ever truly thought “this is the future”
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.
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.
Connection speed, not transfer speed indeed – that was purely network dependent. In any case nobody was transferring 1GB files from their phones at the time :)
airdrop uses wifi direct... so
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.
Do we have proof this actually happened, or theorising based on EU requirements?
You can read the actual ruling at https://ec.europa.eu/competition/digital_markets_act/cases/2...
This is the "smoking gun" section:
(N.B. The decision calls it "iOS 19" because it predates Apple announcing that "iOS 19" would actually be called iOS 26)It is possible, I suppose, that Apple intended all along to release this feature with iOS 26. You'd have to be an Apple insider to know for sure. But the simpler explanation is that they did it because the EU told them to.
But does Apple use/allow Airdrop over Wi-Fi Aware? It's not clear to me that's something they shipped.
From the same article I linked:
(§5.7 is 13 pages of exquisitely detailed requirements for Airdrop interop)Given Apple's usual release timelines, June 2026 is a bit early for iOS 27 (what the ruling calls iOS 20). In between that, the fact that this is a pretty big piece of feature work, and the fact that they were forced to ship other parts by iOS 26, I find it likelier that Apple shipped this in iOS 26, rather than shipping it some time next year as a point release.
Also, you have to consider the timing. Google is shipping this functionality now, a couple of months after the iOS 26 release. It would be just plain weird for Google to ship a reverse-engineered implementation of Apple's old proprietary stack after Apple has definitely already shipped part of the new, interoperable stack.
They don't. Google implemented AWDL, as can be trivially proven by just running `strings` on the new code in Play Services.
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.
AoE2 is not known for great network code, so I think the hopes for that specifically are pretty slim.
The irony is that the netcode is excellent now, but locked to proprietary platforms.
Is it really excellent? I mean, the game still FPS drops, when only one person in a multiplayer match is lagging. But maybe that could be attributed to engine problems, rather than network code issues.
The rest of the code seems not too great either, considering the humongous system requirements, compared to the historical versions of the game. If you ask me, they could have kept it 2D sprites and it would have been completely fine. But they had to go 3D ...
That's just been my experience. LAN especially seems rock solid, once it's going. All sorts of issues getting it to connect sometimes. Definitely lag sometimes online.
I'm with you on the system requirements bloat. Really sad honestly. That said, I don't think the engine is more 3D than it used to be, is it? I believe it's still isometric 2D with 3D physics. Could definitely (definitively?) be wrong though.
Here's some discussion on it: https://www.reddit.com/r/ageofempires/comments/16aowwc/are_t...
Hmmm that would mean incredibly bad performance though. I mean, there is even a machine performance test, before you can play online, because the game is too heavy for many machines these days, while running 8p games just fine back in the day on waaaaay weaker hardware than most people have these days. What then is causing the massive performance regressions? Maybe resolution increase?
To me it looks kinda 3D, when you pane left right and look at buildings, but I could be wrong and that could be merely some effect, that also takes some on the fly calculation.
Which app are you using?
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.
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.
Is it actually? Apple supports AirDrop over Wi-Fi Aware? Any source or confirmation?
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.
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.
Your reply makes sense in a vacuum, but in reality we have the context of having seen Apple comply with regulation maliciously before, so we do know for sure that there's no macOS in the sdk because they weren't forced to by regulation.
> we do know for sure that there's no macOS in the sdk because they weren't forced to by regulation.
Unless you have insider knowledge, we don't know anything for sure here. Apple isn't a person. Apple doesn't have a single, consistent opinion when it comes to openness and EU regulation. (And even a person can change their mind.) All we know is that some teams at apple responded in the past to some EU regulation with malicious compliance. That doesn't tell us for sure what apple will do here.
Apple is 165 000 people. That's a lot of people. A lot more people than comment regularly on HN, and look at us! We don't agree about anything. I'm sure plenty of apple's employees hate EU regulation. And plenty more would love to opensource everything apple does.
That sort of inconsistency is exactly what we see across apple's product line. The Swift programming language is opensource. But SwiftUI is closed source. Webkit and FoundationDB are opensource. But almost everything on iOS is closed source. Apple sometimes promotes open standards - like pushing Firewire, USB and more recently USB-C - which they helped to design. But they also push plenty of proprietary standards that they keep under lock and key. Like the old 20-pin ipod connector, that companies had to pay money to apple to be allowed to use in 3rd party products. Or Airdrop. Or iMessage. AFS (apple filesystem) is closed source. But its also incredibly well documented. My guess is the engineers responsible want to support 3rd party implementations of AFS but for some reason they're prohibited from open-sourcing their own implementation.
We don't know anything for sure here. For my money, there's even odds in a year or two this API quietly becomes available on macos, watchos and tvos as well. If you "know for sure" that won't happen, lets make a bet at 100-1 odds. If you're sure, its free money for you.
I largely agree with you but want to highlight a few points.
> Apple doesn't have a single, consistent opinion when it comes to openness and EU regulation.
But it does have a greedy leader who can and does override everyone else.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/24/apple-exec-phil-schiller-t...
> Apple is 165 000 people. That's a lot of people. A lot more people than comment regularly on HN
How do you know the HN numbers? I’m not doubting you, I’m curious about the data.
> and look at us! We don't agree about anything.
At the same time, anyone can join HN. There’s no “culture fit” or anything like that. It is possible to have a larger difference of ideas in a smaller pool of people.
> AFS (apple filesystem)
APFS, not AFS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_File_System
It’s a few million page views on the front page and a small fraction commenting.
Again, what’s the source of the data? Anyone can throw around vague numbers. “A few million” and “a small fraction” provide no useful information for the context.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26999954
AirDrop works via AWDL, I think you're just wrong...
Not anymore.
but if airdrop as of OS26 uses wifi aware, and the proprietary awdl version has been shuttered due to the eu regulation, how come devices on that software version can still airdrop to older devices?
Thank you for the pro-consumer regulation, EU.
Crazy what those kooky Europeans do. Now if I have a friend, I can
- send a file to their phone
- charge their phone if they visit me [1] (without a huge bag of accessories)
- send them money [2] (without them giving some weird company their banking details)
- pay them [3] (even if they are from a neighboring country)
What will they think of next?! And to think, some of these things even work in the US. What a time to be alive.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Equipment_Directive_(202...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Bank_Account_Num...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro
[flagged]
[flagged]
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.
[flagged]
I read the comment several times, and I can't figure out your intent, or the message, because of how much it's coded in doublespeak. That might also be what trips others up.
Don't you think that "They didn't leave the EU, and surely not leave US [if they start regulating]"?
Makes it clear?
Background sentiment, US politicians always justify not regulating due to the "fear" of corpos leaving?
I didn't catch on to that at all. I even wrote my own comment, but seeing your reaction to the other guys' comments, I have re-read your original, and frankly, couldn't figure it out. I have asked ChatGPT and it decoded your intent correctly, and even seeing that, I couldn't reconcile it with the comment itself.
They say that a lot of communication is lost over text. I'm sure I could have caught the sarcasm if we spoke in real life, but in this textual form, it was completely lost to me, and it seems that for the other commenters as well.
Your previous comment in this thread doesn't even form a sentence. It's unintelligible.
Your previous comment was a run on sentence and didn't make much sense at all.
your comment was a little hard to parse
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.
[flagged]
I read your whole comment, and damned if I know what you’re trying to say. The problem does not lie with the reading comprehension of your audience.
Don't you think that "They didn't leave the EU, and surely not leave US [if they start regulating]"?
Makes it clear?
Background sentiment, US politicians always justify not regulating due to the "fear" of corpos leaving?
[dead]
Possibly relevant comment from a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26893693
>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 to https://medium.com/@kieczkowska/introduction-to-airdrop-fore... (but is archived).
I wonder if Google is adding metadata as well. Otherwise there does seem to be the problem of, for example, threats being AirDropped in a public place.
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.
They would seem to contain identifiers as law enforcement have been able to follow up on instances where there has been airdropping of perverse images, but as noted by others the files don't include names.
The problem with airdrop (and likely why the 10 minute setting now exists) is that it includes a preview image as part of the notification request.
So other than being able to subject someone to perverse images, preview images have also been used in state-sponsored zero-click attacks to infect the phones of their targets. While that vector seems to be muted for now, the 10 minute setting provides a layer of defence against both potential future zero-clicks and receiving unsolicited previews images.
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.
Another fun side effect, if you put an emoji in your name, you'll need to manually edit it every time you use Apple pay or it breaks the transaction.
that's hilarious. and why would you put an emoji in your name :D
Is anything but the zip code actually checked ever? Besides the number and cv2 or whatever.
No. Credit card transactions cannot check for name or billing a part from the zip code. Also the zip code validation only works in certain countries like the US, and Canada.
The way to validate that works is Visa 3DS or MasterCard 3D Secure. Those sent an OTP from the issuer to the cardholder on the issuer database, usually an email or SMS. The issuer of the card is the only who really knows the owner of the card.
> Credit card transactions cannot check for name or billing a part from the zip code.
This is not true. Name and address verification is common.
https://corporate.visa.com/en/solutions/acceptance/verificat...
They get compared yes, and it feeds into the fraud likelihood score that the merchant gets sent. And then usually chooses to ignore, because they make more from going ahead with the transaction than from stopping because it's suspicious, but it makes it easier for the credit card industry to put the liability on them.
Number, date (though I never bothered to check if it's actually checked, besides stupid frontend shenanigans when I couldn't enter it because it had a whole whooping month ahead of the current date) and CVC.
As soon as I learned what BANK NAME is acceptable name I used it almost everywhere.
I’ve never heard of this. Are you saying I could enter “MyLocal Bank” as the payer name instead of my own when transacting online with a credit card? This seems like the kind of fact that should be essential privacy knowledge if true!
Well, try it. But don't blame if some over zealous merchant would deny you without refund despite receiving you money.
This might not work super well if your package is crossing border either. Sure it's your billing address and not your shipping address, but sometimes they are all the same.
Well, for example, I can set Stripe Radar to hard match the name on the CC, for example. Very granular control is possible, but doing stuff like checking zip codes, names leads to false negatives and isn't worth it, in my experience.
Do other file systems even support the extended attributes from Apple?
When you create a ZIP, the extended attributes are saved to separate files. When you copy them to a FAT filesystem they are also saved to separate files.
Interesting, but now this information is no longer attached to the original file and you need to manually include it, when distributing the file. Also it is now kind of obvious, that there is not only the file itself in the ZIP file.
It’s not obvious if you are only using macOS, because macOS hides all of these extra files it creates. It’s only obvious if you use Windows or Linux. But of courses the chances of a typical macOS user also using Windows or Linux is very low.
"... 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.
It took the EU forcing Apple's hand. If it were up to Apple, you'd still need to buy an iPhone/iPod/iPad/iMac to get access to basic file sharing.
Apple could have implemented this a long time ago but decided not to implement Bluetooth file sharing.
AirDrop is faster and more secure and reliable than simple Bluetooth file sharing. There are a number of reasons they weren't going to do that.
Airdrop is a proprietary format and doesn’t work on my laptop, which runs FreeBSD.
Please stop excusing this anti social behaviour.
Tons of antitrust cases and people still believe this in 2025.
DAE remember in 2010 when Steve Jobs said that Facetime would be an open industry standard?
FaceTime got caught up in patent issues that precluded both opening it up and resulted in architecture changes: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/report-after-pat... .
This makes no sense as an explanation. They changed the architecture not to infringe on the patents. So the patents are not stopping them from opening up now.
Indeed. We have flying cars, FSD, AI and borderline AGI, robots, yet file sharing is like breakthrough in technologia.
This is why we need more scrutiny against big tech. Interop and platform openess.
Hopefully the speed of innovation will increase as Apple is forced to be less shitty of a platform owner.
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!
The astounding feat of reinventing Bluetooth...
Airdrop has nothing to do with Bluetooth
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.
WiFi Direct has been in Android for at least a decade, maybe even a decade and a half: https://developer.android.com/develop/connectivity/wifi/wifi...
The code was added to Android with Android 4.0 back in 2011.
You can check for WiFi Direct networks manually in Settings > Network & internet > Internet > Network preferences > Wifi Direct. If you live in a city, you can probably find one or two printers in the neighbourhood advertising a WiFi Direct channel you can use to print over.
Well, one gatekeeper. Wifi direct/aware seems to work fine outside of iOS and Mac os.
It is now supported bey iOS as well, thanks to the EU: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/WiFiAware
I prefer https://pairdrop.net/ ; nicer interface
To continue the thread, my favorite is https://drop.lol
I’m using FilePizza when I need it, saw it on HN recently. All this AI magic allegedly taking our jobs, but we still can’t transfer files from one device to another, or print a document reliably.
https://file.pizza/
I've been very happy with Blip. My use case is to share processed photos from my MacBook to my Pixel to use for Social sharing. It's super-fast, especially when the devices are on the same LAN.
> we still can’t transfer files from one device to another
Nor send text message with images.
Why would a text message support images?
Or react to images sent by those that can.
Is replying not enough? I always feel like react is a lazy way to avoid replying
A well placed react can be quality comedy. Also very easy way to communicate to somebody you saw what they sent/are doing what they asked.
reactions are richer than a word
what about two words
A text is already a lazy way to avoid speaking.
One level of laziness should be enough for anyone.
idk, for me text is more hard. talk is easiest. voice messages is top lazy and I hate them.
Drop.lol works in android-firefox. File.pizza isn't, for me.
To continue to continue the thread relaysecret.com and relaysecret.com/tunnel Found it on hn years ago, still use it all the time. Perfect replacement for Firefox send, rip
What about b.o.b.? https://bob.osau.re/
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.
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
- 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.
It does, and it works to windows machines too
Does it use internet to open up the connection? Because I vividly remember the share screen not even finding the other device (and vice versa). Could also be extremely slow internet being worse than no connection at all
I’ve been using AirDrop to send files between different mames of iOS phone and tablet for ages.
The fact that you are impressed that different products from the same brand are interoperable between them says volumes about Apple and Apple users.
Android didn't have a way to share files between them for the longest time. Initially there was Beam but it never worked. The first semi-reliable way to exchange files between two android phones, without using a third party utility, was Nearby Share dates from 2020.
So yeah, it's a low bar, but one that only Apple bothered to clear from the get go apparently.
Ah, uneducated smugness, another Apple trait. It's been possible to share files between any android since 2009, via Bluetooth.
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.
Even expecting state on a single device to remain is a pretty tall order. Something randomly happens at least once a week which forces me to close all my browser tabs, either the OS or the browser restarts. Often while I'm working.
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.
I suspect that just having a single device for everything is more likely.
Seems like that would be pretty huge.
> 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.
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.
+1 for Brother. Works flawlessly without any drivers. The only pain point is the setup - I have the cheapo laser one without any screen, and AFAIK you need Windows software for the initial WiFi setup. After this, it's not needed anymore.
Another +1 for Brother. They even manage to continue printing sanely after paper jams. Linux, Mac, Android, iPhone, all print with zero effort.
Yeah, my Brother printer just works too. No other brands seem to.
Printer manufacturers make it difficult. There are standard printing protocols but printer manufacturers will disable those until you've installed their ad-filled, subscription-filled app. If it weren't for the industrial sabotage, just plugging a USB printer into a computer or clicking "add printer" from a network browser would just work out of the box.
Mopria pretty much universally fixes printing on all competent printers by smoothing over the rough edges of IPP.
If you're on a Linux or Mac computer which uses CUPS, its pretty easy.
> 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.
Just tell your MUA to only display the plaintext version. You should do that anyways.
I mean that to protect the proverbial technology-challenged grandma it should be the default.
And that it should even s,http://.*,,g them out.
> I mean that to protect the proverbial technology-challenged grandma it should be the default.
Yes, I agree.
> And that it should even s,http://.*,,g them out.
No. Links are very useful and constantly present in conversation and manually written into messages. Do you seriously propose to basically ban them by default? Also I don't want the MUA to censor messages, that would also lead to a lot of confusion.
If anything, they could not render them as hyperlinks by default, but stripping them out, no.
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.
Could it be that this process needs to be running in a secure enclave
No, not at all. Someone even implemented AirDrop in Python before[1]. In fact, nothing ever needs such special hardware. It's a decision of the implementer if they'd like to get fancy and rely on such hardware in their implementation to change its security profile, but the iPhone at the other end or any Apple infrastructure would be none the wiser - they just see that they're getting appropriately signed or encrypted, and neither knows nor cares how that came to be. Use of a hardware security module would just make the process more tamper resistant but would not otherwise change the outcome.
1. https://github.com/seemoo-lab/opendrop
Relies on OWL which does have specific hardware requirements
It requires WiFi active monitor mode, which is a standard chipset feature. Nothing related to custom silicon, secure enclave, hardware acceleration or other such shenanigans being brought up in the current conversation, and nothing that most android phones wouldn't fully support.
No, OWL only appears to have specific driver requirements, namely that they expose to userspace functionality that any remotely modern WiFi chip should already have.
"you will need a Wi-Fi card supporting active monitor mode with frame injection" https://github.com/seemoo-lab/owl
Yeah, I saw that. I'm pretty sure that's a statement more about the drivers than the underlying hardware. Open-source drivers often have more limited feature support than the underlying hardware. I doubt anyone is producing WiFi chips that cannot transmit arbitrary software-constructed WiFi frames, or capture and relay to software all the frames they hear, and ACK frames as needed while doing so. But it's very easy to imagine that some of those capabilities would not be publicly documented, or not enabled with the default firmware provided to end users. Those limitations that hinder Linux end-users tinkering with their machines don't necessarily apply to an OS vendor with a deep partnership with the relevant hardware vendors.
Active monitor mode doesn't allow using AWDL while staying connected to a regular Wi-Fi network. That needs special firmware support.
Could be special needs for the radios
previous pixel phones also had custom Google silicon, just with some Samsung IP
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.
Yay if you pay additional fee you will maybe get Bluetooth file sending to PC
QuickShare already works for Android <-> Windows/ChromeOS, though.
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.
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.
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.
A revolutionary advancement in consumer rights. This technology was possible for years but Apple didn't want their users to escape their grip.
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.
You realize that you can copy files gl and from other providers like Google Drive, Dropbox etc from the files app on iOS just like you do on any GUI and you can also copy files from the iPhone by just plugging in a USB C mass storage device?
Never owned an iPhone, but I have familiarity. Here's Apple's instructions for "exporting" your photos from iPhone. Note: it does not say plug the iphone in and drag the photos from the "Photo" folder to your external device. It says this:
> Export photos and videos to an external storage device
> You can export photos and videos you took on your iPhone directly to an external drive, a memory card, or other storage device.
> Note: For photos and videos that have been edited, the unmodified original version will be exported.
> Connect your iPhone to the storage device using the Lightning or USB-C connector, or connect the device directly to your iPhone.
> Go to the Photos app on your iPhone.
> Select the photos and videos you want to export.
> Tap the Share button, then tap Export Unmodified Original.
> Tap your storage device (below Locations), then tap Save.
Note that you have to request permission from Apple's app before you can actually export the data. The filesystem doesn't gate you this way.
https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/import-and-export-pho...
So here's a question: can you export modified versions of photos that have been edited? Well, that seems to be tough. Searching around, you find wild discussions like this: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8567773?sortBy=rank
This is the kind of shenanigans I'm referring to. No access to just copy data from the app. Android has a similar issue with apps, but at least the filesystem is a first class citizen on Android. That is, I can simply copy any photos directly off my phone like it's USB mass storage.
It’s asking for permission on the device because there are real threats that you plug up your phone to an untrusted device thinking it is just a dumb charging port and it can extricate your data.
As far as why you can’t export your edited photos, is that iOS doesn’t actually exit your photos. It applies the edits from what I can tell as a separate “filter” that’s stored as metadata so you can undo your edits. How do you export your edits in a cross platform way? Would you rather have destructive edits? Maybe you would. But either way there are tradeoffs.
And files have a different data store than a photo.
You just plug any mass storage device into your iOS device and it shows up in the Files app and you copy and paste files like you would in the Finder or Explorer. In fact, in the Files app, if you have a third party storage service like Google Drive or Dropbox, they also show up as location in Files along with iCloud. Meaning you can copy directly from Google Drive to your mass storage device.
You can’t do that with any random “file explorer” on Android - ie a consolidated location for local storage, cloud storage from 3rd party providers, network connections, and mass storage.
Yeah, I get it. I don't want any of that, I just want a filesystem.
I'll take care of cloud storage with SyncThing (or whatever) -- I'm the kind of guy that values being able to choose the parts. I don't buy "cold medicine", I buy ibuprofen, diphenhydramine, pseudoephedrine or whatever else I decide, and I'll dose each based on my symptoms. Because that's just better than some prepackaged thing. And I do the exact same thing with computing. Works great. But Apple fights.
The whole world of mobile computing is actively fighting giving the customers the ability to compose their tools, which strips away user agency, and creates all these issues with "big tech" being monopolies and locking users in. This is at the root of what the DMA is about, I think.
Yes I’m sure “you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
With iCloud, if I drop my phone in the ocean by mistake, I can walk into the Apple Store, buy another phone, log in and my new phone looks and acts like my old phone with all of the bookmarks, icons, app data, settings etc being restored.
I use SyncThing. It works well.
Does SyncThing automatically back up everything? Settings, in app data, icon positions, bookmarks, messages, and browsing history?
If you through your phone in the ocean and gestured on another one, would your new phone look just like your old one?
And it’s been discontinued for Android….
https://forum.syncthing.net/t/discontinuing-syncthing-androi...
We're having different conversations.
How so? I want my backups to actually backup everything. No one cares about backups - they care about restores as the old saying goes.
If I can’t in fact throw my phone in the ocean when I’m away from my computer, go buy another phone, log in and everything is automatically restored, it’s a poor solution
Because Apple realised that phone users are interested in photos, videos, contacts, documents, appointments etc. not files
Despite others thinking you’re crazy, I think you are right. I remember the start of the smartphone era where many of my relatives switched to iPhone because "you know where the pictures are going and where to find them". The worst offender was my dad that had a Samsung phone running windows phone 6 (with an actual start menu) where you had to dig through folders to find jpeg files.
Desktop OSs are the worst for mixing random system files with the users own documents. Theres a better balance now where the “Files” app has your documents, downloaded stuff and similar, while system and app data is hidden.
Isn't that pretty much just Windows? That basically never occurs on Linux and it's not common on macOS, either. All the garbage I have on my work computer (a Mac) in ~/Documents is stuff that OneDrive synced over from when I used to have a Windows computer there. (If I could turn the OneDrive feature that takes over ~/Documents and ~/Downloads, I would.)
Linux software is notorious for spewing crap all over the user's home directory. Delete everything inside your /home/name and see how well the system still works. On iOS/iPadOS nothing happens other than not having the documents you saved in there.
I'm not sure there even is a good place where programs can store their internal system files without requiring root other than mixed in with the user Home.
> I'm not sure there even is a good place where programs can store their internal system files without requiring root other than mixed in with the user Home.
/var/run/user/<uid>/ ?
Or what do you mean?
/run isn't for¹ application data, and it's also not persistent (it's often on a tmpfs).
But sure, an OS could in theory use something like /var/cache/<uid> instead of ~/.local/cache. I'm not aware of anything that does, though.
----
https://specifications.freedesktop.org/fhs/latest/run.html
You are right. I see a lot of applications putting stuff into /var/run/user/<uid>/, but this is mostly ephemeral runtime data, notably sockets. And of course systemd has service units there, which don't seem temporary at all, but it's systemd, so whatever... .
The correct way for what I intend would be /var/lib/user/<uid>/, but yes this does not exist on my host. But I honestly don't see why non-ephemeral per user data shouldn't be put into /home. It is definitely user-specific, under the control of the user, instead of the OS, and when you want to move your user to another host (or sync it), you definitely want to include that data as well, so putting it across the OS filesystem sounds kind of dirty to me.
I think the systemd units in /run are indeed ephemeral, and indicate units that are active. If they have permanent counterparts (some units, like transient timer units, don't have them), you'll find them under /etc/systemd or /lib/systemd for system units and ~/.local/share/systemd or ~/.config/systemd for user units.
> But I honestly don't see why non-ephemeral per user data shouldn't be put into /home
I think I agree— as long as the conventions are clear, I think it's reasonable to have some hidden dirs under $HOME set aside for configuration and cache and so on.
Maybe there's value in exposing a single directory as the root of a sandbox for user files, so users have to go farther out of their way to screw things up, especially depending on your audience. Maybe a decade from now Linux desktops will have something like this, because most apps will run sandboxed in Flatpak, unable to write to the root of $HOME. (Idrk how that's organized, though— maybe apps are just allowed to edit "their" dotfiles without modifying their location.)
But I'm not sure that obscuring configuration data's place in the filesystem in that way is really desirable or necessary. I doubt most users inspect or think about hidden directories on Unix-likes unless they're looking for them anyway.
Yes and no. Some older conventions for dotfiles are a bit messy in that they're not necessarily contained under top-level directories like ~/.config or ~/.local, but the hijacking of non-hidden directories for contents unrelated to their purposes, like using ~/Documents for game saves, is basically unheard of (except for some ports of Windows games that retain this bad habit).
> On iOS/iPadOS nothing happens other than not having the documents you saved in there.
That is, frankly, a ridiculous test for the issue under discussion. Even if everything was stored under a top-level subdirectory set aside for application data in a perfectly orderly way, nuking $HOME would still break things.
Besides all that, hidden directories in the root of ~ are conventional¹ places to store application config files and so on, and can't be mistaken for conventional places to store documents. On most Linux-based operating systems, the conventional place to store documents is (obviously) ~/Documents, which is created ahead of time for all users. That folder doesn't generally end up polluted with things that aren't documents.
> On iOS/iPadOS nothing happens other than not having the documents you saved in there.
If you delete /var/mobile or any of the things that $HOME points to in the context of some app, you'll definitely lose app settings.
The app sandboxing on iOS does something nice by sort of forcing app configuration data to live within conventional directories, but none of that is captured in the "what if you delete ~" test. (The fact that $HOME isn't really directly exposed to the user sort of does; the local files you're comparing to $HOME on Linux are actually $HOME/Media on iOS.)
----
1: https://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/FHS_3.0/fhs/ch03s08.htm...
2: https://www.theiphonewiki.com/wiki//private/var/mobile
Weird story...people open up their gallery app and there are the pictures.
Never have been different. What did your relatives doing?
That's the thing, this was the very beginning of the smartphone era, 2007-2009. UX was not fleshed out yet. Conventions neither. Simple gallery apps were an Apple and iPhone thing.
There were cases where phones were not consistent. Pictures from the camera, or saved from MMS, or saved from the Web, or screenshots, did not all go in the same place. Just like you would have on a desktop :) I don't remember that well the pre-2010 android, but it had some issues too.
Even to this day, WhatsApp saves photos to the gallery, but in its own album. At least on iOS those are part of the regular gallery so you'll always find them (an album is just a "tag" on the photo). Android has a dedicated album too, but the picture set is distinct from the main picture gallery. So are screenshots. That's more control and power, but utterly confusing for older people. Younger relatives are fine, older fail to navigate around this and find "the picture your auntie sent to me through whatsapp". Yup, it's there, but not in the main camera roll.
This is what I mean by "you know where the pictures are going".
PS: Apple botched the UX of the gallery app in the last two iOS versions so much that even I, a young tech-inclined person, loses my way around. So do my relatives. They're sorta catching up /s
A file system and its files are a very simple abstraction that lets us organize these exact things.
I understand that some people get confused and overwhelmed by a directory structure, but I see that as an education problem, not a UX problem. I was taught all of this in elementary and middle school computer classes in the '90s and early '00s. Having this knowledge early on made me less afraid of my computer, made it feel less like a magical black box, and gave me the confidence to learn more complex topics on my own.
Computers become way more capable when the people using them understand fundamentals like directory structures and command line usage. I don't think either of these things are as difficult to learn as reading, writing, and arithmetic (especially if you already have a base level education in those three things).
If more "everyday people" just had a little bit more knowledge about these things, they would be able to do way more with their computers with less of a reliance on proprietary solutions that funnel them down whatever path makes someone else the most money.
its a UX probpem insofar as service providers will decide that since they give you a view over the file system, thats enough.
i want file system access, but as a power tool. the 50 clicks through different folders is irrelevant to my most common 5 patterns of use. those should be a single click, or 0 clicks
I tried out zoxide and fzf ctrl-r history on linux (zsh) recently. Game changers.
Where is zoxide for my phone? Why is there so little innovation?
Trillion dollar companies can't come up with a single new thing. Or rather, won't come up with a single new thing because they're just useless rent seekers.
It's absolutely pathetic.
But what they own is files. Most users aren't interested in mutual funds, but that doesn't mean they don't want them in their retirement portfolio.
One reason I'll never own an apple device, and prefer buying more expensive more open competition. Its just a red line - I own the device by law, if you bend backwards to prevent me from using it via ways that it supports by principle, your product doesn't exist for me.
You are not Apple's target audience, and there is nothing wrong with that.
The problem is that because fleecing dummies is so profitable, it encourages the same scummy behavior by other companies.
Calling an extremely broad user segment dummies is unreasonably condescending.
Did I say they were all dummies?
You said there's nothing wrong with how Apple exploits their target market.
Scummy behavior being normalized is what's wrong with it.
And files…
... This is a joke... Right?
"Dad, download the PDF and then email it to me."
"The file disappeared. I can't find it."
"Look in the download folder."
"How do I get to that?"
iOS isn't just a phone OS.
It is. The other OSes have different names.
Only so they could pretend that iPhones and iPadas are separate platforms under DMA
I generally agree that iOS/iPadOS aren't two different operating systems, but "iPadOS" predates the DMA.
Barely... the iPadOS brand was introduced in 2019, the European Commission proposed the DMA in 2020, and even prior to this there were obvious noises being made in Europe with regards to future regulation. Maybe its coincidence, but the timing still lines up for this being a response to the threat of EU changes.
So Apple preemptively split the names because they knew exactly how the unreleased DMA was going to affect them?
Law drafting in Europe doesn't happen behind closed doors and typically even has consultations with the companies affected by it. It wasn't unreleased only because it wasn't signed yet.
Steve Jobs, 2007: "iPhone runs OS X"
And it indeed was running a fork of OSX… which was later renamed.
lots of things have happened since then.
Im not sure if Android has caught up but the iOS file explorer app is excellent.
Saying "I'm not sure if Android has caught up" when Android is decades ahead of Apple in that regard is some kind of... something.
Certainly wasn’t ahead with the stock file manager that came with my last Android phone.
What about after you spent the two seconds to install a different file manager?
Ghost Commander was better but I think I still prefer the iOS Files app.
That also could have been from the phone manufacturer OR from the carrier.
This is why I've avoided non Pixel phones since the Pixel5 came out. None of that 2 or 3 apps for the same thing so everybody can get their ad cut payout.
Your Samsung or whatever manufacturer bloated trash ≠ Android.
I used the AOSP app I think? I’d usually agree with you but in this case I really wanted some more bloat because that one was dire :)
Still no smb/webdav/sftp somehow...
https://sites.google.com/site/ghostcommander1
Whenever I'm forced to help with iPhones, I'm baffled how hard everything is. And I had my own iPhones previously. Download a file, unpack it and open in an app is an exercise is frustration, and that's just hoping that I will find the file due it being newest. Working with directories and old files properly, like on Android, I'm not sure if its even possible on iOS. And all that with a crappy keyboard with hidden numbers and special symbols, making searching even harder.
I'm pretty sure that iOS only has a file explorer app because Android supported it.
There was almost a whole decade there where Apple pretended that the feature just didn't need to exist.
To be fair, Android lacked a stock file browser for much of its existence.
The difference is that iOS still doesn't show you the files on your device. It only shows you files in a small area.
I love Android but Android does that too. Apps have their internal storage area which you can't access unfortunately (not without root anyway). Nor system files.
There's a difference between "can't see 'special' folders" & "can't access anything but the app-specific storage". iOS loves the latter, while Android lets you organize files mostly normally even if doing highly stupid/discouraging things for power users & some app developers making questionable non-default choices.
While I bet there’s some technicality I’ll get gotcha’d on, iOS apps do the exact same nowadays.
iOS apps didn't, for the majority of the iPhone's lifespan. I explained this "technicality" upthread:
> There was almost a whole decade there where Apple pretended that the feature just didn't need to exist.
The history lesson is appreciated but how does this relate to the current state of the stock file explorer that ships with the OS? I’m using my phone now and not ten years ago.
edit: oh, I think I get it. My original post wasn't intended to be read "iOS invented the file explorer, has Android also a file explorer app" (which would be silly, of course) but "when Files app released, the AOSP file explorer that commonly ships as the default was lacking, has this improved (caught up to Files app)"
Maybe include the word "default file manager" next time :)).
Android is possibility/ (overdose of) options Apple is polished (and late).
Different strokes for different folks
When I had an iPhone (a few months ago), there was no way for apps to see files in the filesystem. I wanted to play some music and I had to copy it over to each of the music player apps separately. Is that not the case any more?
That’s entirely up to the app developer. Of course apps can see files if they’re developed to do that.
VLC for iOS uses the filesystem. You can add files with Finder (newer macOS), iTunes (older macOS), or the Files app on the phone.
You are correct that each app can only see a specific part of the filesystem, unless the apps are by the same developer and part of an App Group.
Am I supposed to be mad about them not supporting a feature during a time when I didn’t use iOS or is this somehow supposed to impact my current day use of Files app?
"Im not sure if Android has caught up but the iOS file explorer app is excellent." ~ you several posts up.
Remember folks, the iphone was released in 2007, and the files app in 2017. Cut & paste? Apple didn't give ios a clipboard until 2021.
> Apple didn't give ios a clipboard until 2021.
Apple added copy/paste in iOS 3.0 in 2009
Was the list time you had an Android pre-2017?
It was around that time it (Files app) got a major refresh.
Try connecting to a WebDAV server on File. It's possible but it's shitty. And try using Syncthing on iOS to keep your files synced across devices without having them uploaded to servers you don't control.
Also, on Android, you can choose any file explorer. You're stuck with Files and it sucks (but it looks nice).
I don’t have one of those! I do have an SMB share mounted that I’m currently playing music from, though, and it’s working perfectly fine.
The difference is that the Files app works with third party cloud storage providers.
Next time you give Android a try, you might like Solid Explorer https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=pl.solidexplor...
The one major issue is that it doesn’t work inside other apps. If I save something in Word, it pops up the standard File dialog and every storage provider available for my iOS device - Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, iCloud Drive, local storage, network drives, and locally connected mass storage devices are available.
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.
Which apps?
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.
Ios has an app called "Files".
Now "bluetooth" I could buy (and I do not miss at all).
What's a computer?
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?
Lets just zoom into a single use case. The ability of the user to buy a 3rd Party watch that integrates with their phone:
* Apple doesn't allow 3rd Party watches to send text messages. The Apple Watch is allowed to do so.
* Apple doesn't allow 3rd Party to take actions on notifications. The Apple Watch is allowed to do so.
* If you want to use the internet on your watch, you must: 1) install a 3rd party app, 2) keep that app open. Closing the app closes the connection to the internet. The Apple Watch does not have this restriction.
* 3rd Party watches cannot detect if you are using your phone. This means that they will notify users of notifications even if the user is looking at the notification. The Apple Watch does not have this restriction.
* Apple does not have ‘interprocess communication’(IPC) like Android.
* Apple restricts making 3rd Party App Stores. This makes it difficult to make a community of people making watch faces.
All points come from Pebble's blog [1]. This is just a single type of integration that Apple intentionally makes difficult, there are many others (e.g. 3rd Party Photos App, ...)
[1] https://ericmigi.com/blog/apple-restricts-pebble-from-being-...
On iPhones you can't install software except through the app store
Well Android is going to be the same way now, too.
No, that's not true - the change was that you could only install software from verified developers, not only from the app store, and now they've partially walked that back too and "are building a new advanced flow that allows experienced users to accept the risks of installing software that isn't verified." ( https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/11/android-de... )
Certainly not. Google is only mandating signing. That’s already extremely bad but that’s still infinitely better than what Apple offers.
Nah, they rolles that back.
Like sharing your WLAN. It works great between iPhones, if you know how it works and the preconditions are fulfilled (it's undiscoverable). You can't share with Android devices by showing them a QR code – which I would consider the "usual" way and which is easy to do on Android devices.
Edit:
Here is the procedure I was talking about and all prerequisites for it to work:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/102635
iOS hotspots are discoverable by non-Apple devices if you have "Allow Others to Join" enabled and have the Personal Hotspot settings panel open on the iOS device. Otherwise, it's hidden to help prevent unintended connection attempts.
I suspect they mean sharing the password for a regular wifi network, not running a hotspot.
That feature hardly works between iPhones anyway. It’s easier to just open the passwords app and show the QR code.
It has never worked for me on iOS. Everyone kept saying "I can just share the password" but the prompt never popped up, and there was no way to do anything.
IIRC it only works if you are on their contact list. And I think you need to be in the settings app. Something like that. It's a handy feature but Apple could make it easier to understand, and they could do way better communicating why it isn't working, when it does not work.
let me list some things I can do on android which I cannot do on iOS:
* Install real mobile firefox, including installing firefox addons I've built for myself. Firefox on iOS is a safari skin
* Install web browser security updates without also updating my entire OS. On Android, firefox is an app. on iOS, safari is a part of the OS that cannot be updated independently
* Install an open source app my friend built without paying $100/year or having to reload it every 7 days
* Build and install an app without owning a macbook or other macOS device, just using linux
* Filter notifications to my garmin smartwatch by-app
* Change the messenger app that handles SMS
* Have a notification center that syncs between linux and my phone (i.e. KDE Connect doesn't work https://invent.kde.org/network/kdeconnect-ios#known-behavior... )
* Have reliably working file-syncing (i.e. syncthing for iOS) because background tasks are something you can do well in android, and barely at all in iOS
* Have access to the source code to debug and fix problems
* Have the ability to flash my own custom kernel / rom (not all android devices, but many)
.... Really, not being able to write and install my own app without paying apple $100, and without owning a macbook is the big dealbreaker, followed by iOS restricting APIs needed to do all sorts of things like proper notification handling, proper NFC, etc etc.
It amazes me that so many people on the "hacker news" forum are okay with their primary computing device being wildly hostile to the hacker spirit, to the desire to tinker around for fun and learn and hack on things.
Bluetooth LDAC would be cool.
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.
Or they could have figured out a new version of MTP that supports basic features like concurrent access and normal metadata. Or they could have gone for SMB/NFS over a virtual network link. Anything but this horrible interface they've doubled down on.
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...
It always kind of sucked though. You had to go through the pairing process, and then the transfer was incredibly slow since Bluetooth is very low bandwidth.
It’s still a classic Apple “the open standard sucks so build a proprietary one that’s great but only on iPhone”
It worked and it was good enough
At 1Mbit. It was good enough but it absolutely sucks today. Meanwhile AirDrop is hundreds of megabit to a gigabit.
Trying to send a video file over Bluetooth would be miserable.
You could do it even before phones came with Bluetooth via Infrared. Granted, the two phones had to be placed perfectly for the IR sensors to connect, if you moved them the file transfer would break.
Bluetooth was a huge upgrade because you no longer needed to do that.
I recall getting very surprised when my sister got one of the first Windows phones (one with the tile menu) and it didn’t support this feature.
i think microsoft really messed up. windows phone could have been huge. i thought they were going to be. i guess things like this didn't help. they really didn't play their cards right.
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.
Is this really a problem with Apple?
Phones other than iPhones can still share files with each other and with computers using Bluetooth. But people instead use apps like WhatsApp or e-mail for file transfers, even in places where iPhone's market penetration is near zero.
And you could tether, though it was complicated. And slow (1xRTT)
I still do this regularly because bluetooth uses less energy both for the laptop and for the phone, than wi-fi.
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.
And even via IR port.
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.
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
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
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?
They won't, they'll just do another Green-Bubble/Blue-Bubble shenanigan to signal when Apple royalty is transferring a file with an unwashed Android peasant via a gimped experience.
There's teams of people having meetings about how they can degrade people's experience right now.
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.
> Developers will be able to integrate alternative solutions to Apple’s AirDrop and AirPlay services on the iPhone. As a result, iPhone users will be able to choose from different and innovative services to share files with other users and cast media content from their iPhones to TVs.
https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/questions-and-answe...
You realize that doesn’t say what you think it says in your own quote of the citation?
Apple has to allow alternate solutions on the iPhone - not that they have to allow AirDrop interoperability.
Feel free to click on a PDF directly below that quote, I don't have to serve you everything on a silver platter.
I promise you you will find what you're looking for right there.
So you posted a citation supposedly refuting my comment then when you are called out about it instead of admitting you misinterpreted your own citation, you say “look somewhere else”…
So instead of admitting you were wrong and that DMA did indeed strongarm Apple into doing this, you're doing what? Arguing I should've given you a different quote with that info instead of a primary source I've already linked to you?
Weird man, weird.
Well first you were wrong - and your quote shows that you didn’t understand what you were quoting. The EU never forced Apple to have interoperability with AirDrop. It had to support the standard WiFI protocol to allow other apps to be installed on the iPhone that could duplicate its functionally. It’s “weird” that you don’t see the difference.
It’s also weird that you could take the time to deflect and respond twice and not find the quote that backs up your (false) assertion.
That's a different thing, but the EU did force Apple to implement Wi-Fi Aware which is what allows Google to do this.
But this works with the existing airdrop client on the iOS side right? Did Apple change airdrop to use wifi aware, and now Google can build the airdrop protocol on Android?
So is Airdrop now less secure or private? I don't trust any standard Google had their hands in.
On every Apple interoperability thread this argument comes up and at this point I'm convinced it's part of some coordinated effort; surely no one can be that clueless to actually believe this, especially on a technical forum?
AirDrop is a peer-to-peer protocol, both the recipient and initiator need to explicitly take action, and even in Apple's implementation provides no authentication (recipient device is chosen by name, which anyone can change in their settings app). There is no way the existence of this Android client would reduce Airdrop security on iOS.
Do you also believe that TLS between an Apple device and a Windows device not secure either, since the Windows device uses a different, non-Apple-sanctioned TLS implementation, and the mere existence of which would somehow weaken Apple's TLS stack?
First time I hear about Google tech being insecure or not private. Sure they siphon all the info THEMSELVES, but never have I heard about them implementing insecure protocols.
> but never have I heard about them implementing insecure protocols.
That's because they don't. Google takes security seriously. There's a reason GrapheneOS is only supported on Pixel devices currently as well, because of certain hardware security features.
Nothing you do with Google is private from Google but it's certainly designed to belong only to Google, your data is one of their most important assets. Of course they are going to secure it and prevent others besides themselves from getting or using it.
It's the most common misconception with Google, that they "sell your information." They don't, they never have. They use your info, aggregated with all other Google users, to sell targeting for ads. They don't sell the actual data.
> Nothing you do with Google is private from Google but it's certainly designed to belong only to Google
The same also goes for Apple, although Apple doesn't monetize your data as much so they collect less. They'll suck up all kinds of data out of your devices but will strictly protect that data from third party applications any way they can. They're also willing to use that protection to prevent interoperability or integration with third-party devices.
Yeah, Apple collects a lot of the same stuff.
The difference for me is in the business model, and the fact that Apple offers true E2E encryption for photos while Google doesn't. If Google ever made their own version of Advanced Data Protection for Pixel phones, it'd be a wash.
Apple does pose more private defaults, though they will easily steer your towards "make backups encrypted with a key we also know in case you lose your password", which isn't much more private than Google's proposition.
When Google announced their AI hardware features, I was hoping they they'd implement the same offline/encrypted photo indexing that iOS does, rather than shoving everything through the cloud. Unfortunately, Google Photos seems as bad as ever.
On the other hand, setting up automatic backups and photo sync towards a self-hosted Immich/Photoprism instance is a lot easier on Android than on iOS in my experience, despite Google's reluctance to grant storage permissions to apps.
Google does actually have a kind of extended protection (https://developer.android.com/privacy-and-security/advanced-...), but that feeds more data to Google rather than less: it basically has you trust Google to protect you, by having Google pre-scan your browsing and locking down your account. If you're American, that may be worth it if you trust Google enough. It's a combination of Lockdown Mode and Advanced Protection Mode on iOS.
It is more precise to say, that they sell the idea, that they know better due to the fact that they have the data about you.
Yeah. They sell access to you, so an advertiser can tell Google "I want this shown to a mid-thirties tech worker living in SF who likes x,y,z and frequents traveling to q" and Google will show you their ad.
I don't think it's possible for it to get less secure or private.
The walled garden is breached, run for the hills!
Did you read the security analysis that was done on this implementation?
Eh... there is an open source AirDrop implementation, it's 6 years old now.
https://github.com/seemoo-lab/opendrop
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.
Because Google is an underdog here. In your memory Google is Microsoft and Apple is Google.
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
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-...
I was wondering the same. Looking at the statements in the posts, I think so?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
All of the code for this (including AWDL, at least to an extent) is implemented as part of Play Services, unfortunately.
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
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.
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.
I have upgraded dropbox and google accounts and also a VPS, so it wouldn't be hard for me. But for people who aren't big fucking nerds, nothing exists that's as easy as that. Email's limit is crazy low.
In Europe, people use WhatsApp for this. Ridiculous to go through a chat app for this, but it works.
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.
and deeply surveil-able.
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.
~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
I'd use QR codes rather than OCR.
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
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.
Does KDE Connect still require both devices to be on the same network?
That's why I never got around to using it. Hoping it's changed. If Syncthing can share across networks, why not something 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.
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.
Finally! Interoperability like this should’ve existed years ago. Curious how they’re handling privacy & bandwidth
Wi-Fi Aware has been supported by Android since Android 8.0. However, I am a bit unsure if Android and iOS devices can communicate via Wi-Fi Aware with the SDKs that Apple released? They have two example apps, one for the DeviceDiscoveryUI and one for the AccessorySetupKit. However, would it be possible to pair/connect to an Android device? Would be great if someone had an example app.
AirDrop sometimes just doesn’t work and gives you zero tools to debug why. In my experience airdrop between phones seem to work fine (probably helped by UWB), but involving Macs makes it an unreliable mess. Staring at the “there is no one nearby to share with” screen with little you can do. Bonus points when it’s asymmetrical: the Mac finds the iPhone just fine but the iPhone cannot find the Mac. When the device is finally found, tapping on it does not cause the other device to present any UI whatsoever to accept the transfer, and the sending devices simply displays “Declined” after a timeout. And if your Mac has multiple user accounts (traditional UNIX-style security boundary) it is undefined which user account will receive the notification to accept the transfer.
I haven't had AirDrop fail on me, but I have had other similar issues with Apple's "ecosystem" integration.
And that's the frustrating part of using Apple. When it works, it works great. When it doesn't work, you have zero visibility into what's happening or what went wrong, and no tools to debug. It's just a magic black box and you are SOL.
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.
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.
So does this constitute an example that the liberal ideal of companies competing for the best product -with no or minimal amount of public money forced to go this way for public development- ends up becoming basically a miserable and lacking experience for end users during decades? (admittedly it sounds to me like if private companies had invented TCP-IP, the consequences would basically be terrible connectivity products nowadays)
I don't necessarily think so. It doesn't have to be this way. The problem is big tech doesn't have any incentive to compete to make the best product because there's no market pressure to do so.
We've failed, over the past ~25+ years to do any meaningful trust busting and allowed monopolies and duopolies to abuse their market positions and destroy any potential competitors.
Seriously this should be a thing. Would be so much easier.
As with all things Google, they still don't know that they both owned and killed a similar technology (Bump) 11 years ago.
https://blog.bu.mp/post/61411611006/bump-google
https://blog.bu.mp/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bump_(application)
At this point I don't even want to share files with Apple users.
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...
These rulings only affect third-party apps, not AirDrop. Apple is not required to stop using AWDL for system apps, and is also not required to allow third-party implementations of the AirDrop protocol. They are however required to implement a mechanism allowing competing solutions to automatically trigger a prompt to install their own iOS apps, but the deadline for that isn't until next year and they have not yet shipped it.
opendrop works without asking Apple
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.
It's fast, but it's not that fast.
My son regularly borrows my iPhone 14 Pro for shooting video, and I inevitably have to do a large AirDrop transfer to him of all his footage. We usually see about 10 GB per minute, which is really fast
> hundreds of gigabytes was fully transferred in less than a minute.
yeah right
If it was a few large files as opposed to many small ones, this is totally believable. iPhones have Wi-Fi 6E chips, and an ad hoc network where the devices are right next to each other can actually reach the theoretical max speed of the protocol (as opposed to real-world connections to a base station, which never do). I've never measured it precisely but I've transferred ~1 GB disk images over AirDrop in a couple seconds.
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 AirDrop files between my different Apple devices pretty regularly.. I guess everyone has their own system for doing things.
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 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.
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.
Can anyone else implement this, or is it only a google play services thing?
I don't like how android's local share system seems to need to be tied to a google account to work, and from some limited research earlier it won't work without play services installed.
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.
Only took 18 years for apple and google, good work! See you in 2043 for next common feature.
And Pixel phones still not support Miracast because Google want to push their own proprietary tech.
This sounds great but I can’t even get Airdrop to work reliably between my Apple devices, let alone Android.
It's 2025 and finally got back to Bluetooth file sharing OBEX that was supported in Android 2 in 2009, and the Palm 3 in 1998 (using IR), as long as you buy another new phone
Has anyone gotten this to work? I tried with my Pixel 10 and my wife's iPhone 14, and her phone said something like "You can't do this with Android phones".
The iPhone needs iOS 26 and the Pixel needs the software updates Google started rolling out yesterday. You may need to update everything/wait for the magical A/B testing algorithm to permit you to update.
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've for a Pixel 8 Pro, with the latest Android version. I hope they enable this in the future. No reason for it to be only for the 10+
The Wi-Fi radio's firmware has to have special support for communicating via AWDL while staying connected to an access point. The blog post does say that they plan to expand support to other devices, though.
But how else will they convince you to buy a new phone?
Why is it "starting with Pixel 10" and not "starting with Android X"? Will this only be available on new Pixel devices?
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.
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.
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?
Things have inverted: iOS now has a user-visible filesystem apps can expose their data in, while current Android versions model everything around "documents" sourced from "document providers" with major performance and functionality limitations.
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
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.
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.
I've had the same issue as a more recent iOS convert.
I remembering looking into it and I think there's actually two forms of airdrop - one is local only (I think it negotiates over Bluetooth then does actual transfer over a direct WiFi connection). The other is a fallback or something and goes over cellular.
And for some reason it seems to always want to fall back to cellular when you have one bar of shit 3G in the middle of nowhere and are trying to send your friend 2 feet away a shitload of photos from your trip.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Can you airdrop it to me peeps in shambles...
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.
And that's why we all had to buy a copy of MacLinkPlus!
Until they decide we can't again.
This makes me wonder what concessions Google were able to get out of Apple for access to Gemini.
Only tangentially related, but I was greatly disappointed when I learned that iPhones cannot read contact information from an NFC chip. I help my son program the chip, and then we realized that a significant fraction of the population would not be able to read it.
Now do Universal Clipboard:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/102430
You don't realize how much you needed this until you use it a few times.
KDE Connect makes this work between all combinations Windows/macOS/Linux and iOS/Android: https://kdeconnect.kde.org/
Unfortunately, due to privacy restrictions on modern versions of both iOS and Android, updating the shared clipboard with things copied from the phone has to be done manually....
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 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.
Isn't that just Wi-Fi Direct? Which I understand establishes a separate, dedicated temporary network for that task over Wi-Fi, with the two devices being the only ones connected to it? Isn't that still two machines on the same network via Wi-Fi, merely separate from prior networks they may have been connected to? How can you claim there is no local network or that the device doesn't need to be on Wi-Fi at all? Surely they need both a local network and Wi-Fi? Or are you referring to Bluetooth-only transfers?
In any case, my point obviously wasn't that I my home router has to see the packets, but whether/when servers on the internet become involved...
It's "WiFi-Aware" which seems like a related standard. I think the difference is it handles the discovery and secure connection part, then once established its like WiFi-Direct. Because of this I think it's unlikely.
And Apple devices can do this while simultaneously connected to another wifi network. Maybe Android does too. Which would make your concern more possible if it does this too!
Nice.
I can also recommend LocalSend.
Duopoly who?
2025
--
Read with sarcasm
How did Apple agree to this?
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.
https://xkcd.com/949/
...still relevant
Now we just need universal clipboard between Android and OSX
[dead]
[dead]
Eww, green files?
/s
[dead]
[flagged]
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.
AirDrop doesn't open a network port, it creates a WiFi Aware advertisement and a WiFi Direct connection. However I thought this also should not need OS-level changes, just android.permission.NEARBY_WIFI_DEVICES permission.
AirDrop is based on AWDL, which is a proprietary protocol that requires low-level access to the Wi-Fi radio to implement. Apple told the EU that they have long-term plans to migrate from AWDL to the standard Wi-Fi Aware, but have not yet done so (and the EU did not require them to, only that they bring their Wi-Fi Aware support for third-party apps to feature parity).
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.
Yep https://webwormhole.com/
Just needs a WebRTC capable browser.
The official one is at https://wormhole.app
That’s cool, I actually didn’t know that!
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.
Yes, it turns out computers are extremely fast when we're not doing backflips through networks and servers all over the country to do simple tasks.
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.
Not everything needs to be tailored only to the most trivial use case.
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.
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
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
Whatsapp doesn't insist anything. You just send the photos as files
You can indeed! For some reason, I'm having trouble teaching various relatives how to do that