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Comment by irae | Hacker News Reader

It is a shame AirDrop is not an standard across all devices. It's almost 2021 and we don't have a universal way to share files in original format. Most ways to transfer between android/iphone/mac/pc are over the internet and compressed. I guess the industry is not interested in collaboration.

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There is WiFi Direct, a standard which is supported by both Android (since Android 4.0) and Windows 10 (dependent on the WiFi card). It's more of a case for Apple to support it on their devices.

Very true. I had high hopes for Google's "nearby share" which was initially announced as a cross-platform networkless way to share files, but these ambitions seem to have been scaled back to "Android to Android only, and it sometimes uses mobile data as a fallback"...

Because rest of OS will not accept it as a standard...

And it is works only with the contacts in a phone. Most of the time I need to send a file from a company device and I have to add me to contacts in the shared testing device to make it work.

It's easy when you are a monopoly, you don't care about standards and others people...

Which all works great if you serve all markets but my high end work was pushed off Apple because they literally didn't sell machines powerful enough (still don't), trying to get a 60fps 4K video off my iPhone and onto the high end PC to edit it was a complete nightmare I was lucky enough to experience recently.

File is too big for gmail,whatsapp,slack and all the usual gotos, my work Mac laptops hard drive is too small to airdrop there and transfer. Can't remember what my solution in the end was but the walled garden of iOS wasted over an hour of my time on a deadline.

Same with screensharing, miracast/airplay/chromecast there is no universal solution for a simple problem.

only one platform of those four does not support bluetooth. Yes, it is definitely the industry who is not interested in collaboration.

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