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Comment by dsego | Hacker News Reader

I frequently just airdrop stuff between my iphone and mac, that's the best thing coming from android, that and pasting text between devices, eg iban, passwords, etc.

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AirDrop is great in theory, but in practice 80% of the time I try to send a photo to my partner using AirDrop, it simply fails to bring up a notification on her devices. In my experience, Apple often delivers well much of the time, but will allow mysterious bugs like this to pervade a feature for years without finding a fix despite much discussion in their customer forums. I wish they did a better job of fixing such problems.

80% of those 20% of the times it doesn't work, it's just because the receiver's phone either doesn't have Bluetooth turned on, or it just isn't unlocked.

And the remaining 20%… total mystery.

95% is pretty good when I'm Airdropping, "dumb shit I did last night".

I even have the same problem from me to me. My phone to my mac. Bluetooth and all that is on.

FWIW, I found LocalSend (https://localsend.org/) to be quite handy especially since it is a cross-platform solution.

There's also https://snapdrop.net which works in the browser

Snapdrop is fantastic. I have an app version installed on my android device so it'll appear in the share menu.

Yes this is so weird. This like photos sync just doesn't work fully for 10+ years, fundamental features that just works 60% of the time often resolving themselves after a few hours or days with no information given.

Very weird and very annoying. Especially since they are used by millions of people every hour.

I want the source list to be the Finder on my Mac, not "All Photos" on the iPhone. I frequently have 2000+ photos to bring over at once; I hate dragging through all of them to select them, with one mis-touch resetting the selection. I've also found AirDrop to be very unreliable at that scale (does it even work? I've never used it for more than ~a dozen items), and want reliable file transfer functionality that can pick up where it left off if it gets interrupted.

Use the MacOS Image Capture app (built in)

I use KDE Connect to do the same thing across Android, Mac and Windows: https://kdeconnect.kde.org/

Well worth checking out.

> Made for people like you.

I'm stealing this marketing line

Right? Airdrop "just works" and so does copy paste between devices.

If this is a better AirDrop I'm all here for it. AirDrop was already leaps and bounds better than email my android phone to my PC.

You can rsync over ssh from and to Android devices, if you install Termux (Linux in an app).

And SolidExplorer is a good app to transfer data from/to Android.

I'm a long time Mac user, but I really dislike Apple's walled garden on the iPhone and thus switched to Android some years ago.

Airdrop just about never works for me. It’s slow to connect if it connects at all. And this is between my own devices connected to the same iCloud account.

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