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Comment by reeddavid | Hacker News Reader

Looks like it doesn't work on iOS.

What happened to AirDrop? It used to "just work" and now it rarely works.

In the last two days I experienced: - Unable to discover devices (a constant AirDrop frustration) - Transferred a video from iPhone to Mac, had to wait for video to be converted first? - Transferred video from (different) iPhone to Mac, transfer repeatedly resulted in a corrupt 0 byte file

AirDrop has become totally unreliable.

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Check you don’t have any misbehaving GHz-spectrum appliances or devices - like leaky microwave ovens and bad Bluetooth devices.

AirDrop is nice - I understand Apple’s business reasons for keeping it Apple-exclusive, but the lack of bog-standard Bluetooth file transfer in iOS is just being mean.

I've never gotten AirDrop to work. I wasted a whole day, once, double-checking software versions and hardware capabilities and reading every manual and specification and forum post I could find. It seems to be one of those features that magically works, at some times for some people, and leaves no clue why it doesn't, at other times and for other people.

It sounds like a neat feature. I wish I could use it.

Could the latter issue be due to a HVEC codec mismatch? I have an old Mac and it doesn't handle that codec well.

Yes, I investigated the conversion issue and it seems it's due to HEVC / H.265 video being the default in iOS 11, but not supported in older versions of iOS / OS X. I was transferring to a Mac running OS X 10.13 High Sierra.

I had always thought of AirDrop as a straight file transfer, but that's not the case.

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