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Comment by pat2man | Hacker News Reader

This is one of those features that really needs cross platform support. If Apple and Google could just work together and let MultipeerConnectivity and Nearby Connections work together maybe developers would actually develop interesting applications for peer to peer.

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It's presumably built around WiFi Aware, which is cross platform, but the WiFi "Alliance" (owners) won't tell you what it is or how it works or how you can make use of it.

So this is what we get.

100% agreed though. IMO is poison and a major regression from where things stood- barely working wifi p2p- since it doesn't make any interoperability affordances/offerings.

WiFi Aware is an OS-level feature that's being added in the upcoming Android O release. It also requires new hardware support, which means most phones don't support it yet.

Nearby isn't using WiFi Aware. We want it to work on all existing Android devices.

Internally, it's using a mix of WiFi, WiFi Direct, Bluetooth LE & Classic Bluetooth.

Getting proximity-based P2P messaging to work correctly across all devices is complicated. With Nearby Connections, we're trying to provide an abstraction layer that makes it easy.

Seconded. What could be their interest in not making this technology interoperable? I'd there are already some killer applications for only one platform it could be user lock in. Otherwise it's to keep developers from using it, which is strange.

Definitely! It's amazing that two people can have smartphones with wifi, bluetooth and other comms links yet there isn't a standard, platform agnostic way to send a file to another phone.

So now we have Nearby Communications for Android and AirDrop for iOS and we still can't send stuff to friends in the same room, without sending the data through a remote third party service. The only standard supported mechanism for sharing without an app is via email!

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I found no links to the code. Is that closed source too?

Where's the code?

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