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Comment by harrygeez | Hacker News Reader

The most awesome thing about Airdrop is when you can find the other device, and even more magical if you can do that on the first try: you can send files without being on the same network or heck, you don't even need to be connected to the Internet at all. That is neat.

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It is also a bit like black magic when it just won’t work and you can’t figure out why.

That’s been my experience, too. I feel like I’m in some cargo cult suggesting it to others.

“We’ll just do these steps and poof it will be on your machine! One second… Hang on… let’s try again…”

9/10 times they haven't set the permissions to receive files through airdrop. It used to be open, but that was a huge security vuln. People could just airdrop whatever picture they wanted to all the iPhones on an airplane for example

There was also a certain amount of regulatory pressure brought to bear; Hong Kongers were using AirDrop to great effect in outwitting the authorities during the 2019-2020 protests

That's 0/10 for me: I know I have the correct permissions set up with my friends (because we can usually Airdrop each other), but sometimes it just spuriously does not work.

One thing I've noticed when AirDropping pictures to my wife is that the recipient needs to have their phone _unlocked_. That was definitely somewhat confusing when I first started using the feature.

Had this exact thing happen tonight. I wanted to airdrop some photos to my MacBook, worked from my partners phone but my phone just wouldn’t send them. My phone and laptop could see each other in airdrop but they refused to send / accept the photos. Ended up texting it to myself in iMessage and opening that on the MacBook.

I call this the "What is a computer?" effect.

Universal clipboard is pretty great too. It's another thing I wish was just an open standard that all the things supported, not just the Apple ecosystem.

I get a lot usage out of related cousin feature Universal Control, which is the best KB/mouse sharing implementation I’ve used. It manages to feel almost identical to a physical connection even over WiFi, which nothing third party has been able to swing… Synergy, Sharemouse, etc need all involved machines to be connected to the network via Ethernet to pull that off.

Interestingly, it seems to present shared KBs and mice as physically connected devices. Any time I use Universal Control on a Mac I haven’t before the little keyboard identification assistant that opens when you directly plug in a keyboard pops up.

I'd never reflected on the irony of these features being called Universal when they only work on Apple devices, but the 'just works' nature really does feel good.

I sometimes need to work on mobile development, so on advice from a sibling comment I installed KDE Connect, and it's actually pretty great and does copy/paste and remote mouse/keyboard pretty well, but you do have to a) enter the app, b) select the device, c) then finally choose the thing you want to do. They've made it about as frictionless as possible, but it won't be the same as first-class OS-level support. e.g., I can just copy some text on my Mac, and paste it a second later on my iPhone, without any manual orchestration

Pushbullet did it nearly a decade ago[0]. KDE Connect now does it better, and seems to be available on pretty much anything you'd want it on[1].

[0] https://blog.pushbullet.com/2014/08/20/introducing-universal... [1] https://kdeconnect.kde.org/download.html

I hadn’t encountered KDE Connect before, I might check that out for MacOS to Android. It looks like they’ve done the best they can on iOS, I’m spite of how locked down it is

Not sure how it could be a universal standard considering it relies on accounts and a server.

There could be a standard protocol describing how to authenticate and talk to a server, and get notified. It's not that different from chat protocols.

And operating systems could allow user to select their preferred server, although I wouldn't expect Apple to allow something advanced and anti-vendor-locking like that.

Wouldn't a non-Apple controlled authentication system suffice? Taking a punt here, but maybe Matrix could work?

So what? So does email.

I once had a specific device that wouldn’t airdrop to anything. Beyond that one device, it has always, just worked. Instantly. First try.

I wish everything were as simple to use.

Documents is the other app I use for sending files to and from iOS (primarily iPad, from Linux laptops). But I’ve run into a lot more bugs with that, and the transfer setup process requires generating and entering codes. It’s a pretty good UX, but it always reminds you how effortless airdrop is.

I love the idea of a cross platform, open source, airdrop. It’s a lofty, but worthwhile goal.

Airdrop is very nice when it works. Modern apple hardware has a second wifi modem for an ad-hoc connection so it can be faster than normal wifi as well.

But Apple only.. makes it much less useful, even for “Apple people”.

> Modern apple hardware has a second wifi modem

Do you have any sources for that? As far as I know, it's just time-sharing the same baseband and hardware used for regular infrastructure-mode Wi-Fi.

> Do you have any sources for that?

No, I should have picked my words more carefully. All I know is that they can be part of two networks at the same time.

Ah, yes, they can! But that can be done by cleverly timing the usage of a single hardware interface as well :)

You sure about this? I seem to recall it shared the usual Wi-Fi hardware.

Technically yes, it's a virtual device, but not all wifi hardware is capable of running two networks at the same time, Apple carefully selected the "usual" hardware to support this.

I think this is required for WiFi Direct and supported by all hardware?

Almost all Wi-Fi chipsets released in the last couple of years support this.

Many Windows and Android devices have been able to share a Wi-Fi network with other devices over another SSID, for example.

The only thing that's complicated is if a device needs to be a 802.11 station on one frequency/channel, and a host or P2P device on another, but that's almost always avoidable.

Everything else can be done purely in firmware or software.

Has it ever been reverse engineered and reimplemented?

I use apple's IP audio streaming protocol (forget what it's called, air-something) to play music over a couple of edifier-brand speakers from a Linux desktop which is running pipewire's FOSS implementation of the protocol. I don't even buy apple products but i ended up using it because there's no way to just netcat samples onto these things.

There is an open implementation of AWDL, see https://owlink.org/wiki/

But Airdrop for me has been a hit and miss. When it works, it's awesome. But when it doesn't work, there's literally not much I can fiddle with to make it work.

Absolutely. My wife stopped sending me stuff over AirDrop because she can't see my phone half the time. So she just sends me stuff via iMessage. We both have the latest iPhones with the latest iOS.

I’m noticing that a lot of the times my airdrop between my new iPhone and iPad isn’t working anymore. I blame iOS/iPadOS 17. Maybe will be fixed in 17.1 ??

I've had issues since upgrading to i[Pad]OS 17 as well. iPhone 14 Pro and 2022 iPad Pro.

Phone-to-phone airdrop is slow. Unless sending video, the messages app will typically outperform the UX and delivery speed of Airdrop for the person sending the file, which is really the only one that matters.

Airdrop Discovery is slow. Notification of an incoming file is slow. File transfer startup is slow. File transfer completion is slow.

You have to wait at every step and you cannot stop watching it, lest the transfer fail.

The UI for iOS isn't very good either. It floats on top of everything. It's easy to dismiss and impossible to bring back without starting over.

It's a great idea with bad UX, but still better than nothing at all.

This has not been my experience at all. AirDrop always works and is always fast.

The lack of notification when you are receiving is annoying though.

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