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Comment by notatoad | Hacker News Reader

I'm not an apple user, but isn't this essentially solved by airdrop? Or do people not actually use that?

Airdrop is incredibly unreliable. In my experience, you have a 50% chance that the other device will appear. If it works today, there's no guarantee it'll work tomorrow. And that's with all devices on the same Wifi network, in the same room. I don't know why it works so poorly.

Airdrop is pretty much useless because its proprietary and only works on apple devices. A useful tool for photo sharing has to work for almost everyone.

Something is not "useless" because it is only "useful" to a portion of the population. Floppy disks were a useful tool for file sharing in the 1990s, but not amongst people who didn't own computers.

I think you're missing an 'I' or 'for me' in there somewhere. Lots of people find airdrop useful.

Let's try to rescue this statement. Airdrop is useful in general, but there are still large pockets of people for whom it's useless. Large, like don't know, Europe.

Airdrop is the kind of tool that follows Metcalfe's law (with "network" being "people who can Airdrop to each other"). In places where Android is the dominant market player, you'll have little luck trying to use Airdrop to exchange data with other people. This is not dissing Airdrop, just calling out that there's a huge market segment that still has this problem.

Why can't Europeans use Airdrop?

The default smartphone over here is an Android phone, not an iPhone.

That's the case pretty much everywhere, including in the US. I thought that the post implied some structural reason why Airdrop can't be used in Europe by people with iPhones.

there's plenty of scenarios where the apple users in a room comprise "almost everyone".

I use it regularly.

Me too.

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