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Comment by samwillis | Hacker News Reader

I believe AirDrop is a a great example of how Apples vertical integration and full ownership of software and hardware really thrives. It may not offer interoperability with other platforms, but that’s because other platforms don’t have the control needed to implement the same level of integration of hardware and software needed.

Without the direct low level control of the radio hardware they would not have been able to integrate both Bluetooth and WiFi in the way that AirDrop does.

I hope one day standards for this type of functionality appear so that other platforms can implement it. Ideally apple would contribute their tech to create the standard but that’s probably wishful thinking.

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Airdrop is a good example that a easy to use but unreliable technology will beat a hard to use but reliable solution. Airdrop sucks, but even my mom can use it.

> I believe AirDrop is a a great example of how Apples vertical integration and full ownership of software and hardware really thrives.

I guess you don't have two iDevices then? Airdropping something constantly and randomly doesn't work with no popup on the other side. It's totally embarrasing given that they have control over soft and hardware. I'm puzzled how it's even possible to screw this up so badly and leaving it like this for years.

No I do, and the 95% of the time it works makes up for the 5% of the time it doesn’t.

> but that’s because other platforms don’t have the control needed to implement the same level of integration of hardware and software needed.

I seriously doubt this is the case. We're in a thread where people are posting dozens of implementations that work perfectly fine on other hardware.

> Without the direct low level control of the radio hardware they would not have been able to integrate both Bluetooth and WiFi in the way that AirDrop does.

This... is also not necessarily true? Android lets you send arbitrary data through WiFi Direct and Bluetooth alike, I'd really like to see a detailed breakdown that explains how that modulation isn't possible on standard hardware/software stacks though.

Does WiFi Direct et al even work? I've tried a couple of time to share stuff using a wireless methid from my android device to other Android devices and have never managed to do this successfully. What's the magic trick for doing this Android to Android?

AirDrop works perfectly fine on a Hackintosh given you have compatible Bluetooth and WiFi hardware.

Windows has a lot of integrated solutions like that. I think Linux is the main outlier where there's nearly infinite ways to configure the whole OS and each component has at least 2-3 software alternatives (init systems, desktop environments, network management components)

They historically have opened source similar protocols, e.g. they open sourced rendezvous. But generally there would need to be an interoperability reason for them to do so. AirDrop seems like a good candidate for this.

There's Nearby Share on Android.

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