Cross-Platform P2P Wi-Fi: How the EU Killed AWDL
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There's a single kernel commit referencing Wi-Fi Aware from 2023 [0]. iw supposedly supports a few commands pertaining to it [1].
[0] https://web.git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?h=v6.14&id=9b89495e479c5fedbf3f2eca4f1c4e9dd481265e
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53594406/implementing-a-wifi-aware-application-outside-androidFor example Intel's broken Location Aware Regulatory completely breaks any use-cases where your device is not the STA (on anything besides 2.4GHz). Most cards also have no DFS support, meaning you'll be left with a microscopic usable segment. Then there's also the problem with incorrect regulatory information.
All of which in the end makes reliable high-speed point-to-point operation very annoying to achieve. Even if it'd be totally legal. Leaving you with a terribly slow link.
"Fire up adhoc, set it to this ssid, vnc to this address"
Two minutes later, my photos are on five screens around the coffee shop and everyone can see.
Adhoc just worked, and that's more than I can say for a great many things before or since.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Ad-hoc_networking#Manual_me...
people hail apple for what is essentially 3 line script XD
i do understand that it does much more. but 3 line script is closer to what it really is, then what people think it is.
What, the same people that named a consumer facing product 802.11g?
Haven't looked in 2-3 years, but found so little ehm last I looked. Very dismaying. So many folks doing "p2p" file sharing apps, but generally they assume you have setup networking already. We really need to own the means of connectivity. Especially now!
That means you couldn't do it with off the shelf WiFi hardware.
You might be able to do it whilst dropping existing WiFi connections during the transfer.
https://github.com/seemoo-lab/owl
It currently drops connections to an AP, but the authors of the implementation seem to believe this could be fixed:
> OWL does not allow a concurrent connection to an AP. This means, that when started, the Wi-Fi interface exclusively uses AWDL. To work around this, OWL could create a new monitor interface (instead of making the Wi-Fi interface one) and adjust its channel sequence to include the channel of the AP network.
Ideally the second wifi adapter could be USB based! For years usb cards were very second tier; I haven't tried again lately but I assume that's still largely the case.
Given that there are some pretty affordable (below $70) barebones thunderbolt docks for GPUs, it'd be neat to see some thunderbolt docks designed for one or multiple wifi cards (or other m.2).
Can anyone familiar with the topic chime in what it would take to utilize WiFi Aware in let's say a Raspberry Pi (maybe using a different wireless chip connected via usb)? Maybe even to connect to Android smartphones
However, we decided to try it on a recent flight, and it turns out it still requires an internet connection, both to satisfy Steam, and to connect to some sort of LAN coordination server. I ended up paying $20 for in-flight wifi.
We've lost a lot in the last 30 years, but tech like wifi aware might help bring back local-first networking. I choose to believe that if solid APIs exist, developers will use them.
this is actually kind of a hard UI/UX problem for game developers
many p2p+local auto recovery protocols are very bothersome, partially due to some of the protocols being bad or incomplete and a lot due to all kind of hardware & OSs partially or fully crippling them
so game devs often have to fall back to a coordinator server to provide reliable and easy to use functionality for most which also happens to often be the easiest thing to implement and maintain, and then in addition they could also implement work-arounds for the no-internet case
but that is additional cost for a overall niche use case (local co-op without internet), so it ends up in the backlog with low priority at best or gets outright killed. To make that worse steam provides tools to make it much easier to implement co-op (focused on non local co-op), and the easiest way to use them is in a way which always requires internet even for local co-op
so as long as steam doesn't put in a lot of work to make no-internet local co-op close to free to implement for most games it will never happen for most games
- depending on device and application type you not even being able to send broadcast/the OS silently dropping them
- firewall blocking incoming TCP/UDP without hole punching
- p2p in games having security implications (unsafe network stacks, game engine etc. allowing RCEs and similar) so you want to make sure only "more trusted" communication can happen, so TLS is needed, but without actually fully secure p2p TLS is not easy, mainly there are issues with establishing trust (you either have to involve some side channel (i.e. a pin, QR code or similar) or pre-established trust.
The biggest thing is still that as a steam game you have a reliably, proven, easy to use "solution" as part of your normal steam integration which you anyway want to use to be able to use the friend invite system which has the drawback of needing internet for local coop which is niche use-case likely not selling any games. Why would a company implement an additional solution and handle all the UX issues of switching between them?
Whats stopping Apple from doing both?
basically the mandate requires them to not hamper WI-FI Aware in anyway which pushes developers into using AWDL instead, i.e. they require it to be as good +- some technical differences in features not so relevant for 3rd party use cases
and if you provide something which works as good why should they keep AWDL around, it's just double the dev cost and AWDL is getting older and Wi-Fi Aware is getting nice WiFi7 improvements soon
so as long as they don't have some use case outside of what Wi-Fi Aware is supposed to do which happens to work with AWDL they keeping both around long term is not a very good decision economically
How will that work out?
Would be cool if an open standard on auth forms on top of this.
Note that this is only a conversation about sender identification, which allows sending to a "non-world-visible" receiving device and confirmation-less sending to devices with the same iCloud account on them. Anonymous sending isn't cryptographically gated by Apple, to my knowledge.
It might be possible to reimplement the required Apple API, but as demonstrated by the iMessage/Beeper saga, they usually shut such things down pretty quickly.
P2P proximal wireless transfer, sure, but there's half a dozen apps on your phone that'll let you punt a document, a photo, an invite to someone on the other phone OS platform.
Maybe I'm an edge case, but probably 90% of my Airdrop usage is between my own devices, so the platform taking care of the authentication story is of more utility than cross-platform transfers. If someone isn't on iOS I'll just send them the file on Signal since, if the source is my phone in the first place, it's probably not a huge transfer anyway.
Yeah, via their server, which means it's slow even if you have wifi, requires valuable data credit if not, or it requires the installation of a companion app on the other device and putting the other device in the same network.
That's exactly my point: Apps – which users have to install, which requires an Internet connection.
Also all of them routing data through some centralized server, often not end-to-end encrypted.
> If someone isn't on iOS I'll just send them the file on Signal
Approximately none of the people that I've Airdropped photos to in the past have Signal installed, and even if they do, there isn't always an Internet connection available. Airdrop also sends the original photo including all metadata and resolution, which is another big reason I like it.
On top of that, I've Airdropped photos to complete strangers (e.g. if I managed to get a nice shot of something on a tour) with which I didn't have any desire to exchange numbers, and I just would not have been able to send the photo to Android.
Comments like this are one of the few things that can make me jealous of Apple users. I just can't stomach how locked down the platform is as a developer. Android is also getting worse though.
This also roundtrips to the internet, which is slow and expensive compared to a LAN transfer.
You also can't attach files >100MB in Signal. No transferring an installer .iso.
Compared to a decade ago or two, there are too many silos in communication these days as it is.
[1] What is DECT-2020 New Radio (NR), and how big a deal is it? (2021)
If they're excited about this, I'm excited about this.
I don't think this is true. In the early 2000s, in Germany, the alternative, now vastly used "infrastructure mode" was rare because Wi-Fi basestations were rare and expensive, e.g. DSL modems didn't have built-in Wi-Fi.
So the only way of wirelessly sharing internet at home / files with friends at university (which also didn't have Wi-Fi yet) was with ad-hoc mode.
Is this about mandating a version upgrade, or about adding some developer API surface for it?
Basically the EU is now able to force american companies to do things that the US regulator will not do, probably because Apple can manage to lobby US congress but not the EU parliament.
That probably means that US companies can probably help "counter" Apple on certain things as long as the EU sees that it benefits the consumer.
I don't know if Trump somehow caused this situation.
If a "new industry thing" is far superior and what customers want, why other vendors don't do it?
Now, if government sees a benefit in driving and sharing technology I'd be happy the government would actively participate in R&D.
They do, it's only bad when China does it.
I don't recognise Apple as the proponent of the new open standards. They didn't offer lightning to everyone, hell, even to make the lightning cable I'd have to pay a heavy licensing fee.
Apple is not open and proponent of the common standards, hence they must be forced to adapt open standards in the name of interoperability.
Personally I'd prefer lightning port on my phone instead of this stupid and fragile USB-c, bit since Apple wasn't interested in opening their standard.
The other vendors do it. The problem is that we then end up with a dozen of solutions that do the same thing, but are incompatible with each other.
Examples: ARPANET, semi-conductor industry, human genome, LIGO, ITER, etc. etc. etc
Pioneered does not mean inventing, never seen before concept. Pioneered means in this context - taking concepts already used in other radio networks and using them in their "wifi stack". Concepts used for decades before Apple even had iphone.
I am not sure what / why is there difference between speeds of AWDL vs NAN in that table, my understanding was it can transfer at same speeds. Speed being limited by upload capability of "wifi chip".
- I texted it to you, but it looks like crap, because MMS is crap
- I tried to email it to you but it's over 2 megs and I have to walk downstairs, get it off my phone and onto a Real Computer™, then scale it down
- I emailed you a Google Drive link, wait what do you mean you don't know how to sign into that? Yeah just use that app... oh wait no that's a different Google Account from the one you have your Gmail on
- No, I'm not using Messenger, I don't like getting my data zucked by Facebook
- Hey, there's this very easy way you can send files, you just need to install this app - what do you mean you forgot your Apple ID password for the third time this week?
- Let me run downstairs and get my special USB-C flash drive - oh god damn it you still have the phones with Lightning ports on them
- Let me run downstairs and grab my iPad, chuck the image over to it using Dropbox, then AirDrop you
AirDrop just works, not because it's Apple, but because having a direct P2P transfer utility built into every phone and laptop cuts out all sorts of setup and permissioning issues. Apple just decided their protocol was going to be the only one they'd support, and that everyone else who bought the wrong phone should pound sand.
USB-C was the default connector on most devices long before the EU mandate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB-C
> The design for the USB-C connector was initially developed in 2012 by Intel, HP Inc., Microsoft, and the USB Implementers Forum. The Type-C Specification 1.0 was published by the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) on August 11, 2014.[1] In July 2016, it was adopted by the IEC as "IEC 62680-1-3".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_Implementers_Forum
> USB Implementers Forum, Inc. (USB-IF) is a nonprofit organization created to promote and maintain USB (Universal Serial Bus), a set of specifications and transmission procedures for a type of cable connection that has since become used widely for electronic equipment. Its main activities are currently the promotion and marketing of USB, Wireless USB, USB On-The-Go, and the maintenance of standards and specifications for the related devices, as well as a compliance program.
> The USB-IF was initiated in 1995[1] by the group of companies that was developing USB, which was made available first during 1996. The founding companies of USB-IF were Compaq, Digital Equipment Corporation, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NEC and Nortel. Notable current members include HP, NEC, Microsoft, Apple Inc., Intel, and Agere Systems.
We have mega corporations to thank for USB-C. Notably none of these companies are European. None.
Are you sure this will last a decade? The EU has a tendency to demand without thinking. Just like the last time, the modern world will move on, and the EU will pretend like it had anything to do with the next time.
I have no imagination of what you're talking about. EU is more modern than the vast majority of the planet.
I know this will not be popular here but I really do not like the EU's most recent round of "no, you have to open up this feature".
It really isn't that irrelevant in a world in which being able to charge a phone can mean the difference between being able to get on a flight/train etc. or missing it.
Apple switching to USB-C has doubled (or more, based on the country) the odds of finding somebody with a compatible cable and power bank in a pinch.
Besides, I always carry a collection of cables, even for those who mock me.
I've not mocked an Apple user purely for having a non-standard port on their device, though I have more than once mocked the arrogance of an Apple user being put out because when they were wanting to borrow a charger/battery/cable I only had standard parts, those needed to support my devices, in my kit.
I'm not accusing you of being simple minded btw! It's just that most people are like that. Dumb people use windows. Dumb people use apple. Reality is more complex than "X = Y".
I'll take a 1% higher chance of a port wearing out over a 100% chance of needing to always carry two cables and not being able to share accessories with Android users any day.
The fine springy wiry bits that are impossible to clean and easy to damage are on the cable, which is a massive improvement. See: the super common broken Ethernet ports.
I'm old enough to have done that, and to really miss the old world, but an improvement is an improvement.
None of the stuff I grew up with is "hackable" anymore. None of the design constraints of small, sleek, performant, high battery life and secure are amenable to that.
Even (production) Linux has stopped being a hacker's paradise and is tightening the rope.
And that's what the iPhone is: a production phone.
You want some cool toys? Get Arduinos, hacker laptops, RPis, Arch.
It's all still out there, but not every device needs to have its guts out.
That being said I will always miss SoftIce, being able to look stuff up in memory, being able to look stuff up in network traffic... alas, it's gone, and the truth is we're better off for it.
Yeah, basically just repeating what luma said but you have this backwards. USB-C does have the female part on the cable side. Its just also enclosed in a metal cover for protection.
You can keep tooting the Apple horn, Lightning was better than micro USB but saying it's better than USB-C is incorrect on every measureable point. Lightning is dead, long live USB-C!
the problem is, it can snap or be sheared off under unfortunate circumstances - say, someone laying their phone on their belly in bed, putting strain on the connector, a chonky cat deciding to jump down right onto the charger cable while the phone is plugged in, or someone dropping their phone while it's attached to a power bank.
With Lightning, it's a matter of removing the broken connector of the cable and that's it. With USB-C, you gotta replace the socket, tough luck on that given that these things generally don't come as single spare parts.
(IMHO, that is the next thing the EU should tackle - parts that often need to be replaced such as sockets and buttons should be mandated to be on a dedicated flex cable that can be easily replaced)
The only thing usbc has going for it is wide usage.
Lightning can do usb3 things if designed for it. So software side is not an issue between the two.
The springs being on the socket is also not a great feature of Lightning, though usually the device itself has a shorter lifetime than the socket.
The EU did not ask Apple to open up AWDL to competitors, they asked Apple to comply with the Wi-Fi Aware 4.0 standard.
I'm pretty torn, and I know this conversation has been beaten to death on HN, and I have nothing new or novel to contribute to it, but even though this pushes Apple in a direction I'd personally like to see them move - it just feels like regulatory overreach.
What makes this overreaching? We already regulate RF heavily since it's a shared space that would all go to shit if everyone could roll their own incompatible thing
I just personally don't like the idea of governments dictating product decisions when no harm or risk is involved. If Apple wants to sell a product without a feature, it's my belief that they should be able to do that. This is doubly true when Apple developed and patented the feature they're being forced to drop in favor of an implementation they would rather not adopt.
The point is that capital incentives alone do not drive interop, and when interop is low, you get stagnating innovation and stifling competition, which leads to customer choice being limited and high prices during the value extraction phase. Just look at the VC world - competition with better product is for losers, all that matters is dominance and ”market share”.
Corporations aren’t alive, they can’t exercise freedoms, they move wherever their incentives dictate. Good regulations like DMA is a tool to make these entities step out of local optima they’re stuck in. (It even helps the affected companies, long term)
If "Wi-Fi Aware" (almost as ridiculous a name as "Bluetooth Low Energy", but that's a different topic) ends up allowing Android to iOS file transfers without any third-party apps or network connectivity – like feature phones could, 20 years ago – that'll make the top three too.
Still they were stubbornly refusing to bring it to their phones, which are their most popular product line by far, until the EU forced their hand.
But I understand your viewpoint and, again, I love USB-C (and my iPhone). My biases are absolutely playing into my viewpoint on this. I just don't think they were dragging their feet due to wanting to make more from MFI/Lightning as some suggested, it was mostly just being slow to change something that would annoy people (and the change did annoy many people, even though I don't think they should have been annoyed).
I tend to view Apple's actions (and those of any company really) first through the lens of their own self-interest. Killing the headphone jack, which was an open standard, benefited wireless headphones. And, unsurprisingly, Apple's proprietary integration with Airpods help make them the best wireless headphone choice.
While I don't wholly disagree that Apple would have eventually switched to USB-C, I doubt they were slow to migrate out of an abundance of caution. Apple is a huge fan of lock-in, and never gives in to open standards easily.
I’m not a huge fan of the EU government making specific demands of specific companies to adopt specific technologies, but this is Wi-Fi and telecom tech has a long history of adoption through legislation. So it’s not at all unprecedented and is probably the lesser evil in this case.
I don't think it's about cost savings, even. It's just a way to differentiate the products, Apple-style.
There is quite literally no evidence for this theory and mountains of evidence that USB-C is what they were always going to switch to. They had already switched checks note almost every other device they make to USB-C. The few that weren't USB-C at the launch of the iPhone 15 have been moved since then (specifically keyboard and mouse). I'm not sure if there are any Lightning devices left at this point.
There is: https://www.macrumors.com/2023/02/10/apple-planning-to-limit...
Apple was then told by the EU commission to abandon those plans: https://www-heise-de.translate.goog/news/Ansage-der-EU-Kommi...
A second option would have been to make lightning a data only port that would not charge phones.
In either case, the reactions to “in order to comply with EU regulations, wired charging capability has been removed from iPhones sold in the EU” would have been hilarious.
Then having the EU force usbc for the same reason shouldn't be a problem.