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Comment by acidburnNSA | Hacker News Reader

I was talking to my brother about phones the other day and he has to have an iphone for work. He's a federal firefighter in the USA who was hot-shotting all last summer. When they're way out in the middle of nowhere with no cell and no central wifi routers anywhere they use AirDrop to transfer maps and stuff to team members before splitting up. Kinda interesting. Would this tool allow that kind of thing, e.g. for Android to iphone?

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Yes.

Can you elaborate? How does it work without the devices sharing the same Wifi?

I just skimmed the readme. It states a "local network" multiple times. So in this example, the firefighters need a Wifi network to connect the devices. Not because the files are sent over the internet, but because LocalSend doesn't create an ad-hoc network unlike to Airdrop.

So OP: technically yes, but the experience is not quite the same.

Sorry I missed the part “no wifi routers available”. They need to be on the same Wifi with this app, you’re right.

VPN on devices to same network, ie Wireguard or Tailscale.

Won't this still require network connectivity to function?

I mean you could build a little server that offers all this one per fire-truck or something, but it's probably overkill when simpler solutions exist :)

Then you could have the fire-trucks mesh network with each other!

Sarcasm alert: I'm sure that is bound to be 100% reliable out in the middle of nowhere, with whatever cheap power converter they used to provide power from the 12V batteries in the truck, and hopefully doesn't drain them :)

I think it could still be possible by connecting to the wifi hotspot on one of the phones:

https://developer.android.com/develop/connectivity/wifi/loca...

Yep, that should be possible and does not require a router. I would think it is significantly less low-friction than native Airdrop for a firefighter on mission though...

It could have an option to create a hidden hotspot and have the other phone also be able to discover the hotspot automatically (app specific SSID name is searched for and if user is not already in wifi, and hidden hotspot doesn't exist, then it will be created for the duration of transfer). Airdrop doesn't seem too different.

A hotspot requires a cellular connection to an existing network. AirDrop creates a ZeroConf network, which advertises its presence to other devices.

a hotspot that provides internet requires a cellular connection, you can still just make a hotspot that has not internet connection and acts as a regular lan

Are Airdrop networks wifi or bluetooth based ? (or something else)

Handshake is bluetooth, transfer is wifi

AirDrop uses Bluetooth and UWB to find nearby devices and then creates Wifi Direct network between devices to do the transfer.

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