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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

Sony's is a fuckfest, and so is pretty much everyone because Android sucks as well.

The main problem is Bluetooth is dog slow, so they use temporary Wifi networks which have to be manually confirmed twice (once in the app, once in the Android UI)... and the wifi obviously doesn't have internet, so after a short time Android nags you to disconnect because the wifi it's connected to doesn't have internet.

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This is all true, but the camera vendors are adding insult to injury with their ugly half broken apps that mostly don't work on top of that.

Hot take: All these are terrible, but not because the camera makers suck, but because there's no non-sucky way to do the thing we all would want:

What we want: Snap picture, picture is sent over high-bandwidth link to phone

Analysis: Can't be Bluetooth, also it's foolish to assume most pics are in wifi range of an access point, so it needs to be Wi-Fi Direct, like AirDrop is: Able to be performed with or without the parties being ON a network. The parties just p2p transfer the file.

More analysis: What would this take? 1. The blessings of the platform owners, at minimum Apple and other handset makers, probably Google too. The platform owners would need to provide:

1. Ability to make ad-hoc wi-fi direct connections with your other devices. APIs etc 2. Ability to either have your app running in the background, or be automatically silently launched in the background, to receive the image and add it to Photos.

No such abilities exist. All the cheesy hotspot things that they're doing is literally the only way to achieve such a goal without the cooperation of gatekeepers like Apple.

The (for me) most interesting thing is: why the fuck has no one managed to reverse engineer AirDrop and AirPlay yet, in a way that's mass market compatible?

Like, there is OpenDrop but that is dead since five years [1], it was a code dump by some researchers, and there are no client implementations to interact with Apple servers for getting keys, or with registering Find My devices...

[1] https://github.com/seemoo-lab/opendrop

It might be illegal / legally risky for a big company to RE and implement airdrop.

reasons: 1. most other devices don't provides access to low level wi-fi drivers to actually support AWDL. 2. Airdrop is authenticated using Apple accounts on both sides. 3. legal foo

the fact that there is no trivial way to transfer files between any two devices in the same room is one of the most pathetic failures of the tech industry

2024 and people still email themselves files

Isn’t it a success though? :)

I agree with all of that, and that's an elaboration what the parent post said, but I still stand by my statement: the camera vendor apps are shitty because of that too, but they are also shitty because they are badly designed and coded.

The logical conclusion is to just give the camera 5g for the world's most bulky camera phone.

Samsung actually created such a monster. After a few zoom cameras running Android, they finally created the Samsung Galaxy NX, which was a mirrorless camera with a 20MP APS-C sensor and Android 4.2 (it was only slightly outdated on release in 2013). It's a mediocre camera (lacking most physical controls) and a mediocre android device (way too bulky and the fixed touchscreen isn't easy to use).

This is wrong. Wi-fi direct has always been possible with Android phones. Android even supports wi-fi direct connections simultaneously with wifi ap connections. Abdroid also supports the new wi-fi aware, euch simplifies initial contact via broadcasts. I am not sure why the device manufacturers wouldn't implement it. Maybe they target iPhone first as the more premium users (which might only be true in the US), and then think they cannot support that feature for lowly Android users. If enough devices supported this, Apple may be incentivised to follow?

If this is possible without any further APIs needed in Android, you should develop the next generation of the eye-fi type of concept which does what OP wants. You'll make a killing, and I agree, it's the kind of thing which theoretically could force Apple to at minimum steal your idea for their platform, or maybe if they're feeling generous provide an API for developers.

I don't find it that bad. On my Sony camera, you can click the "transfer" button on the camera and then put the camera in NFC range of your phone. Then the Sony app starts, shows you a dialog to choose the resolution you want to download (useless IMO, I just want the original resolution of course) and then the two devices just transfer it through WiFi direct without any problem.

That's my experience, I'm sure it doesn't work well for everyone and it's still too cumbersome to do it all the time. I only use that feature when I really want to send to someone a photo I just took.

Yeah I have a Sony as well, and the amount of clicking is pretty darn annoying for my use case - I document far-right rallies on Twitter, which means I gotta be fast in transferring pictures from my camera to my phone.

Ideally, I'd have the camera be constantly connected to my phone's hotspot so I can immediately browse the photos and upload them - partially because selecting photos on the camera to be transferred is a pain, and partially because while Sony does allow connecting to an AP and transfer from a laptop, it is an exclusively foreground application, meaning the transfer interrupts when I have to spontaneously make a new photo / video.

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