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.

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)

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.

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.

> he 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)

Sounds like a Nikon mirrorless. I have a Z6iii, and I am constantly confused with the networking setup. There are something like three duplicated menus, all with very similar functionality.

Which app are you using?

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.

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 anymore.

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

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.

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.

Is anything but the zip code actually checked ever? Besides the number and cv2 or whatever.

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.

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?

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.

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... .

Airdrop has nothing to do with Bluetooth

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.

To continue the thread, my favorite is https://drop.lol

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?

Except Apple is the one making file sharing hard between non-Apple devices and they aren't making most of their money on ads

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.

I’ve been using AirDrop to send files between different mames of iOS phone and tablet for ages.

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 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.

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.

Just tell your MUA to only display the plaintext version. You should do that anyways.

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 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.

previous pixel phones also had custom Google silicon, just with some Samsung IP

QuickShare already works for Android <-> Windows/ChromeOS, though.

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.

Because Apple realised that phone users are interested in photos, videos, contacts, documents, appointments etc. not files

Im not sure if Android has caught up but the iOS file explorer app is excellent.

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.

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?

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.

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?

the underlying tech seems to be based upon awdl principles contributed by apple

> 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...

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.

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.

In the year of our lord 2007, my classmates would send (often explicit) videos via bluetooth from their phones (of any manufacturer/model/platform) to teachers' laptops when they were plugged into the projector. They would usually auto-play.