Some background: https://www.ditto.com/blog/cross-platform-p2p-wi-fi-how-the-...
On the Apple side, this was prompted by the EU Digital Markets Act: https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/questions-and-answe...
That might also explain the limited Pixel 10 rollout, if it required a specific WiFi chipset/firmware.
[1] https://www.netspi.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/google-fea...
https://www.ditto.com/blog/cross-platform-p2p-wi-fi-how-the-...
In theory Apple could've maintained both, but that seems like a waste of development time to me.
I doubt they would've had to implement any specific protocol if they had just opened up AWDL, but I suppose they'd rather keep that closed to maintain the ability to guard their walled garden in non-EU devices.
They need Airdrop to work with phones who haven’t upgraded, so doesn’t feel like a waste to me. And they already have working AWDL code, so it’s just maintenance, probably not a ton of work.
> Close-range wireless file transfers: this feature allows to access the same iOS-controlled features as Apple’s services in third-party file sharing apps, creating, for example, alternatives to AirDrop.
As you can read here (https://www.ditto.com/blog/cross-platform-p2p-wi-fi-how-the-...):
> Under pressure from the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), Apple is being forced to ditch its proprietary peer-to-peer Wi-Fi protocol – Apple Wireless Direct Link (AWDL) – in favor of the industry-standard Wi-Fi Aware, also known as Neighbor Awareness Networking (NAN). A quietly published EU interoperability roadmap mandates Apple support Wi-Fi Aware 4.0 in iOS 19 and v5.0,1 thereafter, essentially forcing AWDL into retirement. This post investigates how we got here (from Wi-Fi Direct to AWDL to Wi-Fi Aware), what makes Wi-Fi Aware technically superior, and why this shift unlocks true cross-platform peer-to-peer connectivity for developers.
https://darker.ink/writings/Mobile-design-with-device-to-dev...
It has a lot of potential but unfortunately it has been kept back until now by lack of support and interoperability.
Google acquired it and immediately killed it.
Edit: want to emphasize that it was totally ubiquitous. Every phone has it
japanese phones were buggy, feature packed monstrosities. a bunch of companies fighting to check as many boxes as they could. it's not a surprise that they got wiped out by an attempt to make a holistic internet communicator.
but for a while, there was nothing like them and their ability to get information on the internet
In 1993.
Someone even ported it to an emulator! https://shonumi.github.io/articles/art11.html
The only app I have ever truly thought “this is the future”
Since it's relying on your internet connection, skeptical it'd be faster than AirDrop for a large amount of data like photos. But for swapping contacts I bet it was faster since it didn't have to spend time establishing a new direct connection.
By faster I mean the initial connection, it was instant despite the server-based pairing, which made it feel even more magical. With AirDrop you sometimes experience quite a bit of signal hunting.
A comparable experience would be when you touch phones to share a contact with NFC, it was in that ballpark of responsiveness.
iMessage is very bad in certain circumstances, think if the recipient is on 3G or 4G it really compresses videos. It's not obvious and doesn't tell the recipient or offer an option so if you're working in video you keep being told "Can you make it higher res" when this happens
A few weeks later, the CTO looked at my work and asked why it was missing xyz features from his legacy project, saying that if I'm gonna take a project and rewrite it, it better be at least as good as the old project.
It was a pretty good lesson for me to get early in my career, and I've carried it with me ever since. Don't break or rewrite that which already works.
It's evident that no one at Google ever got that lesson.
NB: I know Google definitely has other reasons for acquiring and killing off Bump — they were probably building a competing technology that was shitty and bump was doing it better and sooner than them so better to buy and kill than to make their own product better. But I think my the lesson from my anecdote still stands from a purely product point of view, and I feel like it should make business sense but apparently you can make bad micro business decisions as long as you can convince shareholders they were good macro business decisions.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
PS: I just realized this article is older than some of the people here.
Thanks for sharing, it's always great to learn from folks who have been through it for literal decades.
(Ideally these things are written while the code is being written but let's be honest, we rarely keep those up to date)
The connection can be very fast. In this example, a 280 MB file is transferred in less than 10 seconds:
Over the Internet. There are dozens of such services, and none of them can compete with Airdrop.
The main point of Airdrop is that it doesn't need Internet connectivity and won't use any metered data (or, on recent iOS versions, at least if Wi-Fi Assist is turned off, I believe).
Just as important is the fact that there's no need to install any application – any Apple device comes with Airdrop preinstalled.
This is the "smoking gun" section:
5.4.8. Implementation timing
(245) Apple should provide effective interoperability with the P2P Wi-Fi connection
feature by implementing the measures for Wi-Fi Aware 4.0 in the next major iOS
release, i.e. iOS 19, at the latest, and for Wi-Fi Aware 5.0 in the next iOS release at
the latest nine months following the introduction of the Wi-Fi Aware 5.0
specification.
It is possible, I suppose, that Apple intended all along to release this feature with iOS 26. You'd have to be an Apple insider to know for sure. But the simpler explanation is that they did it because the EU told them to.
5.7.8. Implementation timing
(402) Apple should implement the measures required to enable the scenario of close-range
wireless file transfers while the receiving device has the relevant close-range wireless
file transfer solution open by 1 June 2026. Apple should implement all measures for
the features for close-range wireless file transfer solutions in the release of iOS 20,
and in any case by the end of 2026.
Given Apple's usual release timelines, June 2026 is a bit early for iOS 27 (what the ruling calls iOS 20). In between that, the fact that this is a pretty big piece of feature work, and the fact that they were forced to ship other parts by iOS 26, I find it likelier that Apple shipped this in iOS 26, rather than shipping it some time next year as a point release.
Also, you have to consider the timing. Google is shipping this functionality now, a couple of months after the iOS 26 release. It would be just plain weird for Google to ship a reverse-engineered implementation of Apple's old proprietary stack after Apple has definitely already shipped part of the new, interoperable stack.
I have a modern digital camera complete with wifi and bluetooth. There’s an app that lets me connect the camera to my iPhone for monitoring, remote shooting and copying photos. Very useful! But right now the only way for the camera to connect to my phone is through some super complicated song and dance, involving my phone requesting a connection over Bluetooth, then the camera running a wifi access point that my phone connects to (during which time my phone disconnects from my home wifi). It’ll be wonderful when my camera can use wifi aware instead, and this can all happen instantly, without permission prompts and without booting me off wifi in the process.
The rest of the code seems not too great either, considering the humongous system requirements, compared to the historical versions of the game. If you ask me, they could have kept it 2D sprites and it would have been completely fine. But they had to go 3D ...
I'm with you on the system requirements bloat. Really sad honestly. That said, I don't think the engine is more 3D than it used to be, is it? I believe it's still isometric 2D with 3D physics. Could definitely (definitively?) be wrong though.
Here's some discussion on it: https://www.reddit.com/r/ageofempires/comments/16aowwc/are_t...
To me it looks kinda 3D, when you pane left right and look at buildings, but I could be wrong and that could be merely some effect, that also takes some on the fly calculation.
Sounds like a Nikon mirrorless. I have a Z6iii, and I am constantly confused with the networking setup. There are something like three duplicated menus, all with very similar functionality.
In Linux iw and the new cfg80211 NAN module has support for some hardware. There are few chips in desktop/laptop ecosystem that have the feature, but it is hard to know which ones today, it is more common not to have support than to.
AFAIK no major distros include UI based support that regular users can use. Most Chromebooks do not have the hardware to support, ChromeOS[2] did not have support OOB, so even Google does not implement it for all their devices in the first place.
For Apple to implement is easier than Microsoft or Google given their vertical control, but not simple even if they wanted to. They may still need a hardware update/change and they typically rollout few versions of the hardware first before they announce support so most people have access to it, given the hardware refresh cycle it is important for basic user experience which is why people buy Apple. What is the point if you cannot share with most users because they don't have latest hardware? Average user will try couple of times and never use it again because it doesn't "work".
Sometimes competing standards / lack of compliance are political play for control of the standards not about vendor lock-in directly. Developers are the usual casualties in these wars, rather than end users directly. Webdevs been learning that since JScript in the mid 90s.
All this to say, as evidences go this is weak for selective compliance due to regulatory pressure.
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/2284386/...
[2] I haven't checked recently
One of my first jobs was in infosec, and there was a sign above one of the senior consultant's door quoting Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". That quote is right.
There's so much going on at any medium-to-large organisation, from engineering to politics and personalities. All that multiplied across hundreds of thousands of people in thousands of teams. Its possible you're right. Apple might have provided an iOS-only SDK for wifi aware because of regulatory pressure. Its also possible they want to provide it on all platforms, but just started with an ios only version because of who works on it, or which business unit they're part of, or politics, or because they think its more useful on ios than on macos. We just don't know.
Whenever I've worked in large organisations, I'm always amazed how much nonsense goes on internally that is impossible to predict from the outside. Like, someone emails us about something important. It makes the rounds internally, but the person never gets emailed back. Why? Maybe because nobody inside the company thought it was their job to get back to them. Or Steve should really have replied, but he was away on paternity leave or something and forgot about it when he got back to work. Or sally is just bad at writing emails. Or there's some policy that PR needs to read all emails to the public, and nobody could be bothered. And so on. From the outside you just can't know.
I don't know if you're right or wrong. Apple isn't all good or all bad. And the probability isn't 100% and its not 0%. Take off the tin foil hat and have some uncertainty.
Unless you have insider knowledge, we don't know anything for sure here. Apple isn't a person. Apple doesn't have a single, consistent opinion when it comes to openness and EU regulation. (And even a person can change their mind.) All we know is that some teams at apple responded in the past to some EU regulation with malicious compliance. That doesn't tell us for sure what apple will do here.
Apple is 165 000 people. That's a lot of people. A lot more people than comment regularly on HN, and look at us! We don't agree about anything. I'm sure plenty of apple's employees hate EU regulation. And plenty more would love to opensource everything apple does.
That sort of inconsistency is exactly what we see across apple's product line. The Swift programming language is opensource. But SwiftUI is closed source. Webkit and FoundationDB are opensource. But almost everything on iOS is closed source. Apple sometimes promotes open standards - like pushing Firewire, USB and more recently USB-C - which they helped to design. But they also push plenty of proprietary standards that they keep under lock and key. Like the old 20-pin ipod connector, that companies had to pay money to apple to be allowed to use in 3rd party products. Or Airdrop. Or iMessage. AFS (apple filesystem) is closed source. But its also incredibly well documented. My guess is the engineers responsible want to support 3rd party implementations of AFS but for some reason they're prohibited from open-sourcing their own implementation.
We don't know anything for sure here. For my money, there's even odds in a year or two this API quietly becomes available on macos, watchos and tvos as well. If you "know for sure" that won't happen, lets make a bet at 100-1 odds. If you're sure, its free money for you.
> Apple doesn't have a single, consistent opinion when it comes to openness and EU regulation.
But it does have a greedy leader who can and does override everyone else.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/24/apple-exec-phil-schiller-t...
> Apple is 165 000 people. That's a lot of people. A lot more people than comment regularly on HN
How do you know the HN numbers? I’m not doubting you, I’m curious about the data.
> and look at us! We don't agree about anything.
At the same time, anyone can join HN. There’s no “culture fit” or anything like that. It is possible to have a larger difference of ideas in a smaller pool of people.
> AFS (apple filesystem)
APFS, not AFS.
- send a file to their phone
- charge their phone if they visit me [1] (without a huge bag of accessories)
- send them money [2] (without them giving some weird company their banking details)
- pay them [3] (even if they are from a neighboring country)
What will they think of next?! And to think, some of these things even work in the US. What a time to be alive.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Equipment_Directive_(202...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Bank_Account_Num...