I remember way back in the Android 4 era, my phone and my tablet both supported some "standard" form of WiFi Direct. It worked intuitively (just share a file), was blazingly fast (as fast as P2P WiFi can be), was low latency, and just worked. I used it to transfer media files and backups and it easily beat having to hook up a USB cable to two devices. I was sad to find out this was probably some kind of proprietary interface, because the feature seems to have vanished. It was the best local file sharing mechanism I'd ever used and it disappeared into thin air. Android Beam was nice, but computers and tablets don't have the required NFC hardware to make it work.
I don't expect Apple to play nice with anyone else, but it's time Microsoft, Google, and the various Android manufacturers got their shit together and developed some kind of open sharing system. Google and Samsung already joined forces, but Microsoft seems to have gone off to do their own thing again. We have P2P WiFi for display sharing and the like, why can't we decide on some kind of file sharing protocol here? I don't care if it's SMB or FTP or HTTP, it's really not that difficult a problem to solve. The only issue is that there are hundreds of apps, each with their own protocols and implementations, none of which come packaged with the OS.
Yesterday my son needed to transfer a video file from his Android phone to his school iPad. We tried Bluetooth, but it simply kept failing, no matter what we tried. The devices saw each other and could be paired, but file transfer didn't work at all. We tried sending the same video file to another Android phone, and it just worked on first try.
So, even basic Bluetooth doesn't work in all cases, unfortunately. He ended up recording a video of his phone playing the video... :)
> I don't expect Apple to play nice with anyone else...
This seems to be the problem in our case.
Tonight I'll setup a Nextcloud on our network, this should work properly.
I can’t speak for Russia because I have no data, but most Americans don’t carry the opinion of this government.