- 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...
- 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.
- 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.
by reactormonk
6 subcomments
- Shoutout to https://localsend.org/ - it can even open a local webserver if needed.
- 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
- Why only the pixel 10? What piece of hardware is the pixel 9 (one year old) missing?
- 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.
by OptionOfT
12 subcomments
- 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.
by somanyphotons
6 subcomments
- Am I right to assume that they simply implemented AirDrop without discussing with Apple?
- Finally in 2025, a revolutionary advancement in technology.
by codethief
3 subcomments
- 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.
by marcodiego
3 subcomments
- 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.
- 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.
- ~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 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
by profsummergig
2 subcomments
- 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.
by Aman_Kalwar
0 subcomment
- Finally! Interoperability like this should’ve existed years ago. Curious how they’re handling privacy & bandwidth
by esbranson
1 subcomments
- 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
by lloydatkinson
0 subcomment
- 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.
by TheAceOfHearts
2 subcomments
- 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.
- 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.
- At this point I don't even want to share files with Apple users.
by averysmallbird
2 subcomments
- What are the chances that this is made possible because of the DMA?
- 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.
by 1970-01-01
0 subcomment
- 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)
by alistairSH
4 subcomments
- 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.
by SilverElfin
0 subcomment
- 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.
by jamescrowley
1 subcomments
- I wonder if this works more reliably than airdropping between my iPhone and MacBook… which seems to be 50% success rate at best.
by extraduder_ire
0 subcomment
- 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.
- And Pixel phones still not support Miracast because Google want to push their own proprietary tech.
by urbandw311er
0 subcomment
- This sounds great but I can’t even get Airdrop to work reliably between my Apple devices, let alone Android.
- Only took 18 years for apple and google, good work! See you in 2043 for next common feature.
- 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.
- 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
by linsomniac
1 subcomments
- 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".
- What would it take to make it work when reception is set to "contacts"?
- 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.
- 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+
- Why is it "starting with Pixel 10" and not "starting with Android X"? Will this only be available on new Pixel devices?
by supportengineer
1 subcomments
- 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.
by hshdhdhj4444
3 subcomments
- Of course, AirDrop is absolutely awful.
Is the Android equivalent any better?
by 1970-01-01
3 subcomments
- 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?
- 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.
- 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.
- The Localsend app is the way
https://localsend.org/
- Did you guys notice the number of steps that need to happen to share something as simple as a photo?
by marcodiego
1 subcomments
- 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.
by PunchyHamster
0 subcomment
- I'm sure Apple will slap some annoy-a-trons to it any moment
by hollow-moe
0 subcomment
- 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.
by anshumankmr
0 subcomment
- 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!
- 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.
- 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.
by theoldgreybeard
1 subcomments
- Nice.
I can also recommend LocalSend.
- Duopoly who?
- 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.
- 2025
--
Read with sarcasm
- How did Apple agree to this?
- https://xkcd.com/949/
...still relevant
by thunfischtoast
1 subcomments
- Now fix Direct Share on android, which is a highly broken feature and has been for years.
- Now we just need universal clipboard between Android and OSX
- [dead]
- [dead]
- Eww, green files?
/s
- [dead]
- [flagged]
by dlcarrier
1 subcomments
- Why is this part of the OS?
- Just use Wormhole for file transfer. Small and easy to use. I have put on all my computers, laptops and phones.
by prmoustache
6 subcomments
- Aren't most people just sending files over whatsapp/signal/whatever instant messaging apps they use?
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