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Comment by perryizgr8 | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate the hard work and expertise. But I absolutely do not get the point in reverse engineering a protocol that has been actively closed off. We can all come up with a universal airdrop RFC instead. That effort would be better spent.

It's not some magic, it will be a very simple protocol.

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Because AirDrop is already available on millions of Apple devices. If you start a new protocol it will only be available for a small user base and you need to ask Apple, Google and Microsoft to implement it.

I think that, like imessage, you need certificates signed by Apple in order to actually use it with Apple devices.

Really you'll be happier if you just ignore everything going on with iOS and Android.

This is not correct, you can receive files from non-Apple devices without any Apple keys. I’m still working on sending so haven’t uncovered the demons lurking there…

IIUC AirDrop is locked to Apple Hardware anyways (by device IDs and similar) so even if you could speak the protocol you wouldn't be able to connect.

^^ this! No need to install anything on my Apple devices. Long term plan is to have an instance of AirDrop Anywhere running perpetually on a Raspberry Pi and have a web interface accessible over the LAN for non-Apple devices to connect to when sharing files.

That said, this is all just a bit of fun so monetising it isn’t really on the cards anyway :)

It's pretty vulgar that Apple people continue to feel like, well, I have a protocol that works on my devices, so what if the rest of the world can't participate? "Works for me!" has it's merits, oh sure, but some willingness to see the faults & deficiencies would be a nice balance.

Is it any different from Linux users pushing software that depends on Linux syscalls to function and scoffing at Microsoft's attempts to achieve platform parity with WSL? I can't tell you how many times I've heard someone in computing say "just use linux!" instead of attempting to solve whatever problem a user is having with their current hardware and OS. We all want to believe that our personal choices are the best ones anyone can make for themselves.

Very little in open source hard-relies on Linux sys-calls. Trying to make this a "both sides" argument is farcical.

Saying that a platform shouldn't lock you in to specific proprietary approaches has a real & substantial non-personal advantage to it that mere personal preference doesn't encompass, as it seeks technical ecosystems capable of organic growth. I don't find your comparison quite valid.

Why would you need MS/Apple/Google to implement it? Just write your client and install it. Anyway you need to install the reverse engineered clients on non-apple devices, which are the majority.

>> But I absolutely do not get the point in reverse engineering a protocol that has been actively closed off.

You might be in the wrong forum. ;P

I kid obviously - but in all seriousness some people actually do this stuff for fun! And also just to know more about the services we use every day.

The fun and the learning, I definitely understand. For me, though, while I don't mind working around technical limitations to develop something, I get immensely frustrated at working around artificial barriers.

All technical limitations are artificial barriers enforced by humans. Software and hardware doesn't just fall out of the sky.

Technical limitations are the result of humans straining in the direction of producing better things, and needing to make tradeoffs by virtue of not yet being gods. I'd put those as distinct from artificial barriers, which are when a product is intentionally worse than it could be (e.g. detect when running in Wine and refuse to run), and was designed to be so.

Probably because reverse-engineering it is less effort than rewriting all the clients that Apple has already written.

AFAIK Apple has written exactly 2 clients (Ios and Macos). It shouldn't be too hard to write 2 extra clients. In return you get to design your own open protocol from scratch and don't need to rely on Apple not breaking it at any point of time.

We already have a standard file share protocol, Bluetooth. The problem is the UX sucks so much that almost no one uses it.

It’s hard to say exactly why Bluetooth can not fix these issues but perhaps the proprietary nature of AirDrop lets apple innovate without concern for standards or legacy.

It's been a decade since AirDrop was released. It's clearly a useful capability, and I would love to be able to share with any device this way. Nevertheless, no universal protocol has emerged, simple or otherwise, that could take its place.

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