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Comment by hammyhavoc | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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