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Comment by bookaway | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one that finds the process of getting files of a decent size from non-Apple devices to Apple mobile devices incredibly frustrating, almost enough to be a deal breaker?

What is the current best practice for the fastest way to get video files on an IPad as of now?

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It's not just non-Apple devices. I use my iPad to make music and sketches, and sometimes I need to move files between my iPad and MacBook. Airdrop almost never works, and transferring in the Files app is confusing--sometimes the file won't appear in the relevant app, or sometimes it appears twice, and it's not clear which is the newer version. I often resort to emailing the files back and forth to myself as attachments, which is not ideal.

If anyone knows of a better way to move files to and from an iPad, I would be delighted to hear it.

Not been an Apple user since a little while after Steve Jobs passed away, but this is in stark contrast to what people usually say about Airdrop. What I usually hear is that it's the greatest thing since sliced bread and how everybody should be using it.

Wow. I’ve seriously actually never heard that once in 15+ years of being a Mac developer and using them full time.

I’ve never actually heard anyone, in real life; or offline, recommend, suggest; or even say one single positive thing about AirDrop essentially since its release.

It’s easily the most unreliable piece of software integrated into the MacOS/iOS platform, just a feature that has been so fundamentally broken since it’s introduction that it makes me wonder why it exists at all.

It’s definitely below 50% on the times it actually works as intended - given any network configuration, combinations of Macs or OS versions…nothing really seems to even consistently affect its continual failure.

AirDrop not working, is the expected result of using the software. As of Ventura I’ve not noticed any improvement in the feature’s functionality since it’s introduction.

I feel like you must have a specific use case for which AirDrop fails more often.

I use AirDrop all the time for various things, and it mostly works as expected. It almost always works correctly when it's transferring between two of my own devices; the only issue I think I regularly encounter is when airdropping to another person's device. But I do not AirDrop particularly large files, so perhaps something goes wrong there.

That said, among average users, AirDrop is pretty consistently considered to be a great feature. I witness this occasionally in-person, but also in online discussions.

It’s certainly not been a specific use case over 10 or so years, I mean…in any given scenario; small files, big files, any given file type, on any given network configuration, with any combination of MacOS or iPadOS/iOS devices, I feel like I have a higher probability of making a dunk from a 3-pointer line than getting AirDrop to work; and that’s been the general consensus I’ve gotten from any fellow developers I’ve actually discussed it with.

If there was any consistent behaviour I could use to get it to either misfire or actually work; I’d love to have seen it, but every major MacOS revision I give it another try, only to inevitably just facepalm and use a USB key or something like DropBox.

It’s a shame, I honestly think it should be a fairly simple technology to implement and make work well, but it’s clearly just…not.

I often use airdrop to transfer small, one off files like PDFs or images. For larger files I transfer through my NAS. I’ve never had any issues using airdrop. I wonder if it’s because people are trying to transfer gigs of data using it.

I use AirDrop all the time. It's great.

I rarely run into issues as well. I actually can't even remember the last time I had an AirDrop issue.

I've rarely, if ever, had issues with AirDrop, and I tend to use it for rather larger zip archives.

> I’ve never actually heard anyone, in real life; or offline, recommend, suggest; or even say one single positive thing about AirDrop essentially since its release.

I've seen lots of people, many non-technical, suggest, recommend, request and use AirDrop.

Anecdotally, I've only had issues when trying to transfer large videos and annotated PDFs (music sheets and from within a specific music app).

Airdrop was amazing when it first came out with MacOS. It really just worked. Our lab of mostly Mac users stopped using USB drives to share stuff.

Then they released a new version of it to be compatible with iOS and enable all the continuity and handoff stuff. Then all the problems started. It simply wouldn’t work. Devices couldn’t be discovered, files couldn’t be sent. Handoff would eat half written emails. The problem was due to the replacement of mDNSresponder with discoveryd which they eventually rolled back.

In fairness it’s been fixed for some time now and I’ve got no more problems with it.

AirDrop is - by far and large, especially in the Apple ecosystem - the single most unreliable, almost guaranteed-not-to-work piece of software I’ve used.

It works - for me - with any combination of Macs; old or new, desktop or laptop, on any given network configuration; in any location - about 3 or 4 out of ten times I give it a shot.

It’s honestly baffling to me how Apple has for more than a decade shipped a major feature that works easily less than half the time in my experience and my co-workers. Coworkers and I mostly completely avoid it at this point; and if we do actually give it a try, it feels more like praying to a God for rain than actually trying to use a piece of software.

I really have to wonder what has made it just so, brutally; unusably broken, for more than a decade.

I just guess nobody at Apple cares?

Same experience here. I've been using Macs and iOS devices for over a decade, and while I cannot say that it never works, I could count the successes on one hand (granted, I don't try very often after so much failure). I've even tried setting the "allow me to be discovered by" option to "everybody", and it still fails.

Maybe the problem is me, but I'm good at computers. I can make them do almost anything else in the catalog. Airdrop is a glaring exception.

I use the files app to move stuff to either a cloud storage (google drive, whatever) or a Samba share. Or, because I'm fancy, a Samba share pointed at a mounted cloud storage directory. :) That seems to work ok.

It is inexcusably obnoxious to do without iCloud, thanks to iOS' hamstrung file system & APIs, plus lightning being stuck on USB 2.0 speeds. But I think this is why the iPad Pro is on USB-C now: so you can hook up an external hard drive with all your bigass files.

I'm surprised they haven't added support in Finder for the iPad to just show up with direct access to its file directory. Surely you must be able to directly move files between an iPad and a Mac that don't require going over Airdrop or iCloud?

Current best practice would depend on what you are trying to do exactly.

But overall the fastest way to transfer files to/from iPad (both in terms of ease/speed of use, as well as the actual transfer speeds) is just hooking up an external drive (whether it is a flash drive or an ssd) and transferring files using Files app (aka the file browser app preinstalled on all iOS/iPadOS devices). Note: this relies on the assumption that you have an iPad with USB-C (aka pro models and some recent non-pro models).

Thunderbolt port on latest iPad Pros? Aren’t they 40gb/s?

Yes. There are plenty of really good ways to transfer files on the ipad now.

It's gotten better in recent years.

Airdrop.

VLC on the iPad will expose a web server that you can connect to and upload.

Safari on iOS has a download manager as well.

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