[HN Gopher] Android and iPhone users can now share files, starti...
___________________________________________________________________
Android and iPhone users can now share files, starting with the
Pixel 10
Author : abraham
Score : 828 points
Date : 2025-11-20 17:04 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.google)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.google)
| netsharc wrote:
| Ah, makes me think of MacOS system 7 days. MacOS formatted the
| 3.5" disks with its own filesystem, so if you copied a file onto
| it, and put the disk in a Windows PC (or DOS?), the PC would go
| "Huh?".
|
| 3 decades later, hooray, now we can share files between Android
| and iPhone!
| fmbb wrote:
| System 7 had built in tools to read and write DOS disks:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_File_Exchange
| coupdejarnac wrote:
| I distinctly remember how it was the bare minimum. You'd
| mount a disk or open a plain text file, and there'd be a lot
| of strange characters that weren't decoded properly.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| And that's why we all had to buy a copy of MacLinkPlus!
| rconti wrote:
| What does this have to do with System 7?
|
| Operating systems have always used their own filesystems, and
| it persists to this day.
|
| The only obvious exceptions that come to mind are iso9660 as a
| standard for CDs, and people generally go out of their way to
| use FAT/FAT32/whatever on USB keys and SD cards for
| compatibility with cameras or whatever device they're plugging
| the card into. But the latter is a choice users actively make
| to ensure the FS is compatible with the device, rather than a
| default.
| moi2388 wrote:
| Eww, green files?
|
| /s
| leshenka wrote:
| What would it take to make it work when reception is set to
| "contacts"?
| bilal4hmed wrote:
| not supported right now, but seems they might be able to make
| it work in the future
|
| https://security.googleblog.com/2025/11/android-quick-share-...
|
| To ensure a seamless experience for both Android and iOS users,
| Quick Share currently works with AirDrop's "Everyone for 10
| minutes" mode. This feature does not use a workaround; the
| connection is direct and peer-to-peer, meaning your data is
| never routed through a server, shared content is never logged,
| and no extra data is shared. As with "Everyone for 10 minutes"
| mode on any device when you're sharing between non-contacts,
| you can ensure you're sharing with the right person by
| confirming their device name on your screen with them in
| person.
|
| This implementation using "Everyone for 10 minutes" mode is
| just the first step in seamless cross-platform sharing, and we
| welcome the opportunity to work with Apple to enable "Contacts
| Only" mode in the future.
| Aloisius wrote:
| That would probably require cooperation with Apple.
|
| The contact-only mode is authenticated using an Apple-signed
| device certificate and a signed record of those contact
| identifiers (as hashed UUIDs) that have been registered for a
| particular Apple ID associated with the device.
|
| Someone with a Mac can extract those from the keychain (the
| people behind OpenDrop have a tool to do this), but otherwise
| you'd need to register a new apple ID, get Apple to register
| the contact information, register a device of some sort and
| then do all the key exchanges.
| OptionOfT wrote:
| The fact that I get excited about this is actually a good
| representation much vendor lock there is.
|
| We used to be able to send files over Bluetooth before the iPhone
| came out.
| rckt wrote:
| And even via IR port.
| tormeh wrote:
| Looks like this is an Apple problem that can ve solved by not
| using Apple products. Every once in a while I look at some
| Apple device and think it's nifty. Shortly after I'm made aware
| of some thing or other that they can't do because Apple just
| doesn't like standards, open source, or just freedom itself.
| hhh wrote:
| Like what?
| dnissley wrote:
| On iPhones you can't install software except through the
| app store
| nkozyra wrote:
| Well Android is going to be the same way now, too.
| StopDisinfo910 wrote:
| Certainly not. Google is only mandating signing. That's
| already extremely bad but that's still infinitely better
| than what Apple offers.
| stavros wrote:
| Nah, they rolles that back.
| miloignis wrote:
| No, that's not true - the change was that you could only
| install software from verified developers, not only from
| the app store, and now they've partially walked that back
| too and "are building a new advanced flow that allows
| experienced users to accept the risks of installing
| software that isn't verified." ( https://android-
| developers.googleblog.com/2025/11/android-de... )
| fainpul wrote:
| Like sharing your WLAN. It works great between iPhones,
| _if_ you know how it works and the preconditions are
| fulfilled (it 's undiscoverable). You can't share with
| Android devices by showing them a QR code - which I would
| consider the "usual" way and which is easy to do on Android
| devices.
|
| Edit:
|
| Here is the procedure I was talking about and all
| prerequisites for it to work:
|
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/102635
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| iOS hotspots are discoverable by non-Apple devices if you
| have "Allow Others to Join" enabled and have the Personal
| Hotspot settings panel open on the iOS device. Otherwise,
| it's hidden to help prevent unintended connection
| attempts.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I suspect they mean sharing the password for a regular
| wifi network, not running a hotspot.
| Gigachad wrote:
| That feature hardly works between iPhones anyway. It's
| easier to just open the passwords app and show the QR
| code.
| stavros wrote:
| It has never worked for me on iOS. Everyone kept saying
| "I can just share the password" but the prompt never
| popped up, and there was no way to do anything.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| IIRC it only works if you are on their contact list. And
| I think you need to be in the settings app. Something
| like that. It's a handy feature but Apple could make it
| easier to understand, and they could do way better
| communicating why it isn't working, when it does not
| work.
| bigyabai wrote:
| Bluetooth LDAC would be cool.
| bhelkey wrote:
| Lets just zoom into a single use case. The ability of the
| user to buy a 3rd Party watch that integrates with their
| phone:
|
| * Apple doesn't allow 3rd Party watches to send text
| messages. The Apple Watch is allowed to do so.
|
| * Apple doesn't allow 3rd Party to take actions on
| notifications. The Apple Watch is allowed to do so.
|
| * If you want to use the internet on your watch, you must:
| 1) install a 3rd party app, 2) keep that app open. Closing
| the app closes the connection to the internet. The Apple
| Watch does not have this restriction.
|
| * 3rd Party watches cannot detect if you are using your
| phone. This means that they will notify users of
| notifications even if the user is looking at the
| notification. The Apple Watch does not have this
| restriction.
|
| * Apple does not have 'interprocess communication'(IPC)
| like Android.
|
| * Apple restricts making 3rd Party App Stores. This makes
| it difficult to make a community of people making watch
| faces.
|
| All points come from Pebble's blog [1]. This is just a
| single type of integration that Apple intentionally makes
| difficult, there are many others (e.g. 3rd Party Photos
| App, ...)
|
| [1] https://ericmigi.com/blog/apple-restricts-pebble-from-
| being-...
| TheDong wrote:
| let me list some things I can do on android which I cannot
| do on iOS:
|
| * Install real mobile firefox, including installing firefox
| addons I've built for myself. Firefox on iOS is a safari
| skin
|
| * Install web browser security updates without also
| updating my entire OS. On Android, firefox is an app. on
| iOS, safari is a part of the OS that cannot be updated
| independently
|
| * Install an open source app my friend built without paying
| $100/year or having to reload it every 7 days
|
| * Build and install an app without owning a macbook or
| other macOS device, just using linux
|
| * Filter notifications to my garmin smartwatch by-app
|
| * Change the messenger app that handles SMS
|
| * Have a notification center that syncs between linux and
| my phone (i.e. KDE Connect doesn't work
| https://invent.kde.org/network/kdeconnect-ios#known-
| behavior... )
|
| * Have reliably working file-syncing (i.e. syncthing for
| iOS) because background tasks are something you can do well
| in android, and barely at all in iOS
|
| * Have access to the source code to debug and fix problems
|
| * Have the ability to flash my own custom kernel / rom (not
| all android devices, but many)
|
| .... Really, not being able to write and install my own app
| without paying apple $100, and without owning a macbook is
| the big dealbreaker, followed by iOS restricting APIs
| needed to do all sorts of things like proper notification
| handling, proper NFC, etc etc.
|
| It amazes me that so many people on the "hacker news" forum
| are okay with their primary computing device being wildly
| hostile to the hacker spirit, to the desire to tinker
| around for fun and learn and hack on things.
| excalibur wrote:
| It's not enough to not use Apple products. You either have to
| convince everyone around you to not use them either, or you
| have to have compatability.
| creaturemachine wrote:
| Ever since the iphone apple has been trying to make you believe
| files aren't a thing.
| Angostura wrote:
| Because Apple realised that phone users are interested in
| photos, videos, contacts, documents, appointments etc. not
| files
| babypuncher wrote:
| A file system and its files are a very simple abstraction
| that lets us organize these exact things.
|
| I understand that some people get confused and overwhelmed
| by a directory structure, but I see that as an education
| problem, not a UX problem. I was taught all of this in
| elementary and middle school computer classes in the '90s
| and early '00s. Having this knowledge early on made me less
| afraid of my computer, made it feel less like a magical
| black box, and gave me the confidence to learn more complex
| topics on my own.
|
| Computers become way more capable when the people using
| them understand fundamentals like directory structures and
| command line usage. I don't think either of these things
| are as difficult to learn as reading, writing, and
| arithmetic (especially if you already have a base level
| education in those three things).
|
| If more "everyday people" just had a little bit more
| knowledge about these things, they would be able to do way
| more with their computers with less of a reliance on
| proprietary solutions that funnel them down whatever path
| makes someone else the most money.
| 8note wrote:
| its a UX probpem insofar as service providers will decide
| that since they give you a view over the file system,
| thats enough.
|
| i want file system access, but as a power tool. the 50
| clicks through different folders is irrelevant to my most
| common 5 patterns of use. those should be a single click,
| or 0 clicks
| brokenmachine wrote:
| I tried out zoxide and fzf ctrl-r history on linux (zsh)
| recently. Game changers.
|
| Where is zoxide for my phone? Why is there so little
| innovation?
|
| Trillion dollar companies can't come up with a single new
| thing. Or rather, won't come up with a single new thing
| because they're just useless rent seekers.
|
| It's absolutely pathetic.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| iOS isn't just a phone OS.
| 1-more wrote:
| It is. The other OSes have different names.
| iknowstuff wrote:
| Only so they could pretend that iPhones and iPadas are
| separate platforms under DMA
| Marsymars wrote:
| I generally agree that iOS/iPadOS aren't two different
| operating systems, but "iPadOS" predates the DMA.
| giobox wrote:
| Barely... the iPadOS brand was introduced in 2019, the
| European Commission proposed the DMA in 2020, and even
| prior to this there were obvious noises being made in
| Europe with regards to future regulation. Maybe its
| coincidence, but the timing still lines up for this being
| a response to the threat of EU changes.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| So Apple preemptively split the names because they knew
| exactly how the unreleased DMA was going to affect them?
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Law drafting in Europe doesn't happen behind closed doors
| and typically even has consultations with the companies
| affected by it. It wasn't unreleased only because it
| wasn't signed yet.
| tgma wrote:
| Steve Jobs, 2007: "iPhone runs OS X"
| kube-system wrote:
| And it indeed was running a fork of OSX... which was
| later renamed.
| 1-more wrote:
| lots of things have happened since then.
| kakacik wrote:
| One reason I'll never own an apple device, and prefer
| buying more expensive more open competition. Its just a red
| line - I own the device by law, if you bend backwards to
| prevent me from using it via ways that it supports by
| principle, your product doesn't exist for me.
| vovavili wrote:
| You are not Apple's target audience, and there is nothing
| wrong with that.
| brokenmachine wrote:
| The problem is that because fleecing dummies is so
| profitable, it encourages the same scummy behavior by
| other companies.
| vovavili wrote:
| Calling an extremely broad user segment dummies is
| unreasonably condescending.
| digdugdirk wrote:
| ... This is a joke... Right?
| supertrope wrote:
| "Dad, download the PDF and then email it to me."
|
| "The file disappeared. I can't find it."
|
| "Look in the download folder."
|
| "How do I get to that?"
| tuetuopay wrote:
| Despite others thinking you're crazy, I think you are
| right. I remember the start of the smartphone era where
| many of my relatives switched to iPhone because "you know
| where the pictures are going and where to find them". The
| worst offender was my dad that had a Samsung phone running
| windows phone 6 (with an actual start menu) where you had
| to dig through folders to find jpeg files.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Desktop OSs are the worst for mixing random system files
| with the users own documents. Theres a better balance now
| where the "Files" app has your documents, downloaded
| stuff and similar, while system and app data is hidden.
| pxc wrote:
| Isn't that pretty much just Windows? That basically never
| occurs on Linux and it's not common on macOS, either. All
| the garbage I have on my work computer (a Mac) in
| ~/Documents is stuff that OneDrive synced over from when
| I used to have a Windows computer there. (If I could turn
| the OneDrive feature that takes over ~/Documents and
| ~/Downloads, I would.)
| SchemaLoad wrote:
| Linux software is notorious for spewing crap all over the
| user's home directory. Delete everything inside your
| /home/name and see how well the system still works. On
| iOS/iPadOS nothing happens other than not having the
| documents you saved in there.
|
| I'm not sure there even is a good place where programs
| can store their internal system files without requiring
| root other than mixed in with the user Home.
| pxc wrote:
| Yes and no. Some older conventions for dotfiles are a bit
| messy in that they're not necessarily contained under
| top-level directories like ~/.config or ~/.local, but the
| hijacking of non-hidden directories for contents
| unrelated to their purposes, like using ~/Documents for
| game saves, is basically unheard of (except for some
| ports of Windows games that retain this bad habit).
|
| > On iOS/iPadOS nothing happens other than not having the
| documents you saved in there.
|
| That is, frankly, a ridiculous test for the issue under
| discussion. Even if everything was stored under a top-
| level subdirectory set aside for application data in a
| perfectly orderly way, nuking $HOME would still break
| things.
|
| Besides all that, hidden directories in the root of ~ are
| conventional1 places to store application config files
| and so on, and can't be mistaken for conventional places
| to store documents. On most Linux-based operating
| systems, the conventional place to store documents is
| (obviously) ~/Documents, which is created ahead of time
| for all users. That folder doesn't generally end up
| polluted with things that _aren 't documents_.
|
| > On iOS/iPadOS nothing happens other than not having the
| documents you saved in there.
|
| If you delete /var/mobile or any of the things that $HOME
| points to in the context of some app, you'll definitely
| lose app settings.
|
| The app sandboxing on iOS does something nice by sort of
| _forcing_ app configuration data to live within
| conventional directories, but none of that is captured in
| the "what if you delete ~" test. (The fact that $HOME
| isn't really directly exposed to the user sort of does;
| the local files you're comparing to $HOME on Linux are
| actually $HOME/Media on iOS.)
|
| ----
|
| 1: https://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/FHS_3.0/fhs/ch03s
| 08.htm...
|
| 2: https://www.theiphonewiki.com/wiki//private/var/mobile
| 1718627440 wrote:
| > I'm not sure there even is a good place where programs
| can store their internal system files without requiring
| root other than mixed in with the user Home.
|
| /var/run/user/<uid>/ ?
|
| Or what do you mean?
| pxc wrote:
| /run isn't for1 application data, and it's also not
| persistent (it's often on a tmpfs).
|
| But sure, an OS could in theory use something like
| /var/cache/<uid> instead of ~/.local/cache. I'm not aware
| of anything that does, though.
|
| ----
|
| https://specifications.freedesktop.org/fhs/latest/run.htm
| l
| Krasnol wrote:
| Weird story...people open up their gallery app and there
| are the pictures.
|
| Never have been different. What did your relatives doing?
| tuetuopay wrote:
| That's the thing, this was the very beginning of the
| smartphone era, 2007-2009. UX was not fleshed out yet.
| Conventions neither. Simple gallery apps were an Apple
| and iPhone thing.
|
| There were cases where phones were not consistent.
| Pictures from the camera, or saved from MMS, or saved
| from the Web, or screenshots, did not all go in the same
| place. Just like you would have on a desktop :) I don't
| remember that well the pre-2010 android, but it had some
| issues too.
|
| Even to this day, WhatsApp saves photos to the gallery,
| but in its own album. At least on iOS those are part of
| the regular gallery so you'll always find them (an album
| is just a "tag" on the photo). Android has a dedicated
| album too, but the picture set is distinct from the main
| picture gallery. So are screenshots. That's more control
| and power, but utterly confusing for older people.
| Younger relatives are fine, older fail to navigate around
| this and find "the picture your auntie sent to me through
| whatsapp". Yup, it's there, but not in the main camera
| roll.
|
| This is what I mean by "you know where the pictures are
| going".
|
| PS: Apple botched the UX of the gallery app in the last
| two iOS versions so much that even I, a young tech-
| inclined person, loses my way around. So do my relatives.
| They're sorta catching up /s
| Gud wrote:
| And files...
| standardUser wrote:
| But what they _own_ is files. Most users aren 't interested
| in mutual funds, but that doesn't mean they don't want them
| in their retirement portfolio.
| rpdillon wrote:
| The file system is the ultimate API, and it gives the user an
| enormous amount of control to take data, copy it, back it up,
| transform it, encrypt it, send it places, restore it, etc.
|
| Apple likes to have far more control than that.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| You realize that you can copy files gl and from other
| providers like Google Drive, Dropbox etc from the files app
| on iOS just like you do on any GUI and you can also copy
| files from the iPhone by just plugging in a USB C mass
| storage device?
| rpdillon wrote:
| Never owned an iPhone, but I have familiarity. Here's
| Apple's instructions for "exporting" your photos from
| iPhone. Note: it does not say plug the iphone in and drag
| the photos from the "Photo" folder to your external
| device. It says this:
|
| > Export photos and videos to an external storage device
|
| > You can export photos and videos you took on your
| iPhone directly to an external drive, a memory card, or
| other storage device.
|
| > Note: For photos and videos that have been edited, the
| unmodified original version will be exported.
|
| > Connect your iPhone to the storage device using the
| Lightning or USB-C connector, or connect the device
| directly to your iPhone.
|
| > Go to the Photos app on your iPhone.
|
| > Select the photos and videos you want to export.
|
| > Tap the Share button, then tap Export Unmodified
| Original.
|
| > Tap your storage device (below Locations), then tap
| Save.
|
| Note that you have to request permission from Apple's app
| before you can actually export the data. The filesystem
| doesn't gate you this way.
|
| https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/import-and-export-
| pho...
|
| So here's a question: can you export modified versions of
| photos that have been edited? Well, that seems to be
| tough. Searching around, you find wild discussions like
| this:
| https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8567773?sortBy=rank
|
| This is the kind of shenanigans I'm referring to. No
| access to just copy data from the app. Android has a
| similar issue with apps, but at least the filesystem is a
| first class citizen on Android. That is, I can simply
| copy any photos directly off my phone like it's USB mass
| storage.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| It's asking for permission on the device because there
| are real threats that you plug up your phone to an
| untrusted device thinking it is just a dumb charging port
| and it can extricate your data.
|
| As far as why you can't export your edited photos, is
| that iOS doesn't actually exit your photos. It applies
| the edits from what I can tell as a separate "filter"
| that's stored as metadata so you can undo your edits. How
| do you export your edits in a cross platform way? Would
| you rather have destructive edits? Maybe you would. But
| either way there are tradeoffs.
|
| And files have a different data store than a photo.
|
| You just plug any mass storage device into your iOS
| device and it shows up in the Files app and you copy and
| paste files like you would in the Finder or Explorer. In
| fact, in the Files app, if you have a third party storage
| service like Google Drive or Dropbox, they also show up
| as location in Files along with iCloud. Meaning you can
| copy directly from Google Drive to your mass storage
| device.
|
| You can't do that with any random "file explorer" on
| Android - ie a consolidated location for local storage,
| cloud storage from 3rd party providers, network
| connections, and mass storage.
| rpdillon wrote:
| Yeah, I get it. I don't want any of that, I just want a
| filesystem.
|
| I'll take care of cloud storage with SyncThing (or
| whatever) -- I'm the kind of guy that values being able
| to choose the parts. I don't buy "cold medicine", I buy
| ibuprofen, diphenhydramine, pseudoephedrine or whatever
| else I decide, and I'll dose each based on my symptoms.
| Because that's just better than some prepackaged thing.
| And I do the exact same thing with computing. Works
| great. But Apple fights.
|
| The whole world of mobile computing is actively fighting
| giving the customers the ability to compose their tools,
| which strips away user agency, and creates all these
| issues with "big tech" being monopolies and locking users
| in. This is at the root of what the DMA is about, I
| think.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Yes I'm sure "you can already build such a system
| yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account,
| mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or
| CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this
| FTP account could be accessed through built-in software."
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
|
| With iCloud, if I drop my phone in the ocean by mistake,
| I can walk into the Apple Store, buy another phone, log
| in and my new phone looks and acts like my old phone with
| all of the bookmarks, icons, app data, settings etc being
| restored.
| sussmannbaka wrote:
| Im not sure if Android has caught up but the iOS file
| explorer app is excellent.
| bigyabai wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that iOS only has a file explorer app
| because Android supported it.
|
| There was almost a whole decade there where Apple pretended
| that the feature just didn't need to exist.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| To be fair, Android lacked a stock file browser for much
| of its existence.
| stavros wrote:
| The difference is that iOS _still_ doesn 't show you the
| files on your device. It only shows you files in a small
| area.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I love Android but Android does that too. Apps have their
| internal storage area which you can't access
| unfortunately (not without root anyway). Nor system
| files.
| stavros wrote:
| When I had an iPhone (a few months ago), there was no way
| for apps to see files in the filesystem. I wanted to play
| some music and I had to copy it over to each of the music
| player apps separately. Is that not the case any more?
| sussmannbaka wrote:
| That's entirely up to the app developer. Of course apps
| can see files if they're developed to do that.
| badc0ffee wrote:
| VLC for iOS uses the filesystem. You can add files with
| Finder (newer macOS), iTunes (older macOS), or the Files
| app on the phone.
|
| You are correct that each app can only see a specific
| part of the filesystem, unless the apps are by the same
| developer and part of an App Group.
| TheGoddessInari wrote:
| There's a difference between "can't see 'special'
| folders" & "can't access anything but the app-specific
| storage". iOS loves the latter, while Android lets you
| organize files mostly normally even if doing highly
| stupid/discouraging things for power users & some app
| developers making questionable non-default choices.
| sussmannbaka wrote:
| While I bet there's some technicality I'll get gotcha'd
| on, iOS apps do the exact same nowadays.
| bigyabai wrote:
| iOS apps _didn 't_, for the majority of the iPhone's
| lifespan. I explained this "technicality" upthread:
|
| > There was almost a whole decade there where Apple
| pretended that the feature just didn't need to exist.
| sussmannbaka wrote:
| The history lesson is appreciated but how does this
| relate to the current state of the stock file explorer
| that ships with the OS? I'm using my phone now and not
| ten years ago.
|
| edit: oh, I think I get it. My original post wasn't
| intended to be read "iOS invented the file explorer, has
| Android also a file explorer app" (which would be silly,
| of course) but "when Files app released, the AOSP file
| explorer that commonly ships as the default was lacking,
| has this improved (caught up to Files app)"
| Paradigm2020 wrote:
| Maybe include the word "default file manager" next time
| :)).
|
| Android is possibility/ (overdose of) options Apple is
| polished (and late).
|
| Different strokes for different folks
| creaturemachine wrote:
| Remember folks, the iphone was released in 2007, and the
| files app in 2017. Cut & paste? Apple didn't give ios a
| clipboard until 2021.
| joshstrange wrote:
| > Apple didn't give ios a clipboard until 2021.
|
| Apple added copy/paste in iOS 3.0 in 2009
| sussmannbaka wrote:
| Am I supposed to be mad about them not supporting a
| feature during a time when I didn't use iOS or is this
| somehow supposed to impact my current day use of Files
| app?
| Paradigm2020 wrote:
| "Im not sure if Android has caught up but the iOS file
| explorer app is excellent." ~ you several posts up.
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| Try connecting to a WebDAV server on File. It's possible
| but it's shitty. And try using Syncthing on iOS to keep
| your files synced across devices without having them
| uploaded to servers you don't control.
|
| Also, on Android, you can choose _any_ file explorer. You
| 're stuck with Files and it sucks (but it _looks_ nice).
| sussmannbaka wrote:
| I don't have one of those! I do have an SMB share mounted
| that I'm currently playing music from, though, and it's
| working perfectly fine.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| The difference is that the Files app works with third
| party cloud storage providers.
| namtab00 wrote:
| Next time you give Android a try, you might like Solid
| Explorer https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=pl
| .solidexplor...
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| The one major issue is that it doesn't work _inside_
| other apps. If I save something in Word, it pops up the
| standard File dialog and every storage provider available
| for my iOS device - Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive,
| iCloud Drive, local storage, network drives, and locally
| connected mass storage devices are available.
| stavros wrote:
| Saying "I'm not sure if Android has caught up" when Android
| is decades ahead of Apple in that regard is some kind of...
| something.
| sussmannbaka wrote:
| Certainly wasn't ahead with the stock file manager that
| came with my last Android phone.
| stavros wrote:
| What about after you spent the two seconds to install a
| different file manager?
| sussmannbaka wrote:
| Ghost Commander was better but I think I still prefer the
| iOS Files app.
| DANmode wrote:
| Your Samsung or whatever manufacturer bloated trash [?]
| Android.
| sussmannbaka wrote:
| I used the AOSP app I think? I'd usually agree with you
| but in this case I really wanted some more bloat because
| that one was dire :)
| esseph wrote:
| That also could have been from the phone manufacturer OR
| from the carrier.
|
| This is why I've avoided non Pixel phones since the
| Pixel5 came out. None of that 2 or 3 apps for the same
| thing so everybody can get their ad cut payout.
| BoredPositron wrote:
| Still no smb/webdav/sftp somehow...
| DANmode wrote:
| https://sites.google.com/site/ghostcommander1
| esseph wrote:
| Was the list time you had an Android pre-2017?
|
| It was around that time it (Files app) got a major refresh.
| Yizahi wrote:
| Whenever I'm forced to help with iPhones, I'm baffled how
| hard everything is. And I had my own iPhones previously.
| Download a file, unpack it and open in an app is an
| exercise is frustration, and that's just hoping that I will
| find the file due it being newest. Working with directories
| and old files properly, like on Android, I'm not sure if
| its even possible on iOS. And all that with a crappy
| keyboard with hidden numbers and special symbols, making
| searching even harder.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| Ios has an app called "Files".
|
| Now "bluetooth" I could buy (and I do not miss at all).
| crooked-v wrote:
| They did a pretty hard reverse on that. There's now a full
| Files app with integration with other apps (cloud storage,
| asset managers like Adobe, terminals for SSH transfers, etc).
| Unfortunately a lot of apps have never caught up and will
| only save stuff in the pre-Files sandboxes and not the shared
| local or cloud containers.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Which apps?
| nosrepa wrote:
| What's a computer?
| Gigachad wrote:
| They have rolled it back over the years. Theres a full files
| app now, USBs can be easily plugged in to the iPhone, every
| app that allows exporting allows saving to the files section,
| etc.
| recursive wrote:
| It goes farther than that. It dates back to at least iPod and
| iTunes library synchronizing.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Yes - it's not like they have had a literal app called
| "Files" since 2017 and if you install apps like Dropbox,
| OneDrive, Google Drive etc they all show up in the Files app
| and are choosable destinations from any app that uses the
| Files dialog...
| kotaKat wrote:
| I miss being able to plug my phone (of any kind) in and getting
| it mounted as a drive letter.
|
| Android misses the mark so much with MTP and iPhone... _waves
| frantically at iTunes_.
|
| (At least, in a weird bizarre twist, the iPhone's Files app is
| actually really useful for me. I find myself formatting flash
| drives, copying stuff from network shares, etc, all from my
| phone and it's so nifty to have nearly-first-class features
| there.)
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| MTP is really, really bad. I have a better experience
| managing files on iOS devices using Linux than I do managing
| files on Android devices using macOS simply because available
| MTP implementations are so awful.
|
| I know that read/write conflict concerns are what got USB
| Mass Storage mode removed from Android, but surely there's
| some way to resolve that. Like it wouldn't bother me a bit if
| Android just locked the device and put it in "file transfer
| mode" when it's mounted on a computer, similar to how iPods
| used to and how Kobo e-readers do now. It'd be worth the
| universal robust multi-platform support.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Or they could have figured out a new version of MTP that
| supports basic features like concurrent access and normal
| metadata. Or they could have gone for SMB/NFS over a
| virtual network link. Anything but this horrible interface
| they've doubled down on.
| Gys wrote:
| > We used to be able to send files over Bluetooth before the
| iPhone came out.
|
| Cross platforms, really? So for example between a Blackberry
| and a Windows CE phone?
| msh wrote:
| I don't know about blackberry, but it worked fine between
| feature phone Nokias and windows pdas / phones (before
| windows phone 7).
| marcodiego wrote:
| Most of what are called "dumbphones" allowed easy file
| sharing over bluetooth. Even the cheapest ones.
| kcb wrote:
| Yea, there's a Bluetooth protocol for it called OBEX.
| _shantaram wrote:
| > Cross platforms, really? So for example between a
| Blackberry and a Windows CE phone?
|
| Yes, it was part of the Bluetooth file transfer spec[0] and
| possible between any two devices that implemented it
| correctly.
|
| 0: https://www.bluetooth.com/specifications/specs/file-
| transfer...
| input_sh wrote:
| You could do it even before phones came with Bluetooth via
| Infrared. Granted, the two phones had to be placed
| perfectly for the IR sensors to connect, if you moved them
| the file transfer would break.
|
| Bluetooth was a huge upgrade because you no longer needed
| to do that.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| I recall getting very surprised when my sister got one of
| the first Windows phones (one with the tile menu) and it
| didn't support this feature.
| stOneskull wrote:
| i think microsoft really messed up. windows phone could
| have been huge. i thought they were going to be. i guess
| things like this didn't help. they really didn't play
| their cards right.
| Gigachad wrote:
| It always kind of sucked though. You had to go through the
| pairing process, and then the transfer was incredibly slow
| since Bluetooth is very low bandwidth.
|
| It's still a classic Apple "the open standard sucks so
| build a proprietary one that's great but only on iPhone"
| dcreater wrote:
| It worked and it was good enough
| Gigachad wrote:
| At 1Mbit. It was good enough but it absolutely sucks
| today. Meanwhile AirDrop is hundreds of megabit to a
| gigabit.
|
| Trying to send a video file over Bluetooth would be
| miserable.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| Yes. When my mom got her first Android phone, she wanted to
| transfer all her photos from her Motorola Razr flip phone.
| She said the guy at the AT&T store had a device that would
| plug in to the data ports of various phones and transfer
| stuff between them, but it wouldn't do it, so he declared it
| impossible.
|
| My mom was upset that she would lose her photos, so I puzzled
| over it for a long time trying to figure out a way. Finally,
| I realized I was being stupid and missing the obvious: both
| phones had Bluetooth! I paired them with each other, dug
| through Razr menus, selected the photos, and did a Bluetooth
| file send. As expected, the photos went right over. Well, I
| shouldn't say _right_ over because it was very slow, but it
| worked just as it should.
| randunel wrote:
| Yes, even "dumb" phones could share files with computers back
| then. Apple users have no idea how much harm their masters
| have done to society.
| trelane wrote:
| And you could tether, though it was complicated. And slow
| (1xRTT)
| eimrine wrote:
| I still do this regularly because bluetooth uses less
| energy both for the laptop and for the phone, than wi-fi.
| joshuaissac wrote:
| Is this really a problem with Apple?
|
| Phones other than iPhones can still share files with each
| other and with computers using Bluetooth. But people
| instead use apps like WhatsApp or e-mail for file
| transfers, even in places where iPhone's market penetration
| is near zero.
| rescbr wrote:
| When I was in high school we chatted exchanging notes/txt
| files between Nokias, LGs, Samsungs and Sony Ericsson feature
| phones and Windows Mobile (I had an HP one) and Symbian (two
| friends who had a N95) smartphones.
|
| This was just as broadband was getting popular, so those who
| had it usually downloaded MP3s and then distributed them at
| school through Bluetooth. I remember one friend using her
| phone as a bridge to copy files from me using Bluetooth and
| sending to another friend's phone using IR.
|
| This was across all the classroom, this definitely wasn't
| restricted to the nerdy clique. We found out that chatting
| through notes exchange worked pretty well and then it spread
| like wildfire. SMSes were expensive in my country!
|
| This was like 20 years ago. Maybe 2006-2007. Twenty years
| later we're commemorating that Bluetooth File Exchange over
| WiFi is now interoperable between the only two major mobile
| OS as if it were a revolutionary technology. How backwards it
| is.
| kccqzy wrote:
| Not just phones, the Mac as well. So it's not like Apple
| doesn't know about this feature of Bluetooth. They just chose
| not to do it on the iPhone.
| kevincox wrote:
| It's really an embarrassment to our society that it took this
| long. And still only by seemingly by reverse engineering with
| no cooperation from Apple.
| pavo-etc wrote:
| You can still send files over bluetooth on devices that aren't
| iPhones. Even Macs support this
| tguvot wrote:
| i am still sending files over bluetooth between android phones
| or between phones and computer
| nebula8804 wrote:
| Vendor lock has been here forever.
|
| Here is a more hilarious attempt to break Vendor lock from the
| 90s!: https://youtu.be/TcJBXgmdX44?t=98
|
| Things were more fun back then. Now Google vs Apple is so
| BORING! :D
| joshuaissac wrote:
| Until reading this thread, I had no idea that iPhones did not
| support Bluetooth for file transfer. I had expected comments
| like "we can do this with an entry-level phone via Bluetooth
| already".
|
| On the other hand, with the ubiquity of always-on Internet
| access and cheap data plans, in most situations where Bluetooth
| would have been used, I now see WhatsApp being used instead.
| mcoliver wrote:
| Why only the pixel 10? What piece of hardware is the pixel 9 (one
| year old) missing?
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| Yay if you pay additional fee you will maybe get Bluetooth file
| sending to PC
| jeroenhd wrote:
| QuickShare already works for Android <-> Windows/ChromeOS,
| though.
| evanjrowley wrote:
| The answer to your 2nd question might be Google's custom
| silicon: https://blog.google/products/pixel/tensor-g5-pixel-10/
|
| The answer to your first question may simply be they want to
| sell more Pixel 10 phones.
|
| The investment into custom silicon is more likely to pay off
| when new and exiting features are exclusive to the newer
| platform.
| russianGuy83829 wrote:
| previous pixel phones also had custom Google silicon, just
| with some Samsung IP
| arghwhat wrote:
| That hardware is completely unrelated to such a simple
| feature. Something like AirDrop will only use fairly trivial
| crypto, which most likely ciphers with full acceleration
| available but even without it would work fine with plenty of
| performance headroom.
|
| Neither Apple nor Google is doing anything revolutionary with
| their silicon for such a standard compute task. It's really
| mostly minor tuning to get a more optimal part instead of an
| off-the-shelf chip catering to other uses too, with die area
| and power consumption "wasted" in your setup.
| bitpush wrote:
| Could it be that this process needs to be running in a
| secure enclave
| arghwhat wrote:
| No, not at all. Someone even implemented AirDrop in
| Python before[1]. In fact, nothing ever needs such
| special hardware. It's a decision of the implementer if
| they'd like to get fancy and rely on such hardware in
| their implementation to change its security profile, but
| the iPhone at the other end or any Apple infrastructure
| would be none the wiser - they just see that they're
| getting appropriately signed or encrypted, and neither
| knows nor cares _how_ that came to be. Use of a hardware
| security module would just make the process more tamper
| resistant but would not otherwise change the outcome.
|
| 1. https://github.com/seemoo-lab/opendrop
| walletdrainer wrote:
| Relies on OWL which does have specific hardware
| requirements
| wtallis wrote:
| No, OWL only appears to have specific _driver_
| requirements, namely that they expose to userspace
| functionality that any remotely modern WiFi chip should
| already have.
| e44858 wrote:
| "you will need a Wi-Fi card supporting active monitor
| mode with frame injection" https://github.com/seemoo-
| lab/owl
| wtallis wrote:
| Yeah, I saw that. I'm pretty sure that's a statement more
| about the drivers than the underlying hardware. Open-
| source drivers often have more limited feature support
| than the underlying hardware. I doubt anyone is producing
| WiFi chips that cannot transmit arbitrary software-
| constructed WiFi frames, or capture and relay to software
| all the frames they hear, and ACK frames as needed while
| doing so. But it's very easy to imagine that some of
| those capabilities would not be publicly documented, or
| not enabled with the default firmware provided to end
| users. Those limitations that hinder Linux end-users
| tinkering with their machines don't necessarily apply to
| an OS vendor with a deep partnership with the relevant
| hardware vendors.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Could be special needs for the radios
| bilal4hmed wrote:
| It says starting with pixel 10, so I assume itll roll out to
| the others after some time
|
| https://security.googleblog.com/2025/11/android-quick-share-...
| Maxious wrote:
| From the linked security report in that post
| https://www.netspi.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/google-
| fea... it seems like they implemented something similar to
| https://github.com/seemoo-lab/opendrop (which was also used
| to test interoperablity
|
| Also `we welcome the opportunity to work with Apple to enable
| "Contacts Only" mode in the future` doesn't make it sound
| like Apple actually helped implement this
| input_sh wrote:
| That's just how they roll out features these days, in about 6
| months it'll be on every Pixel and in about a year or so on
| every Android.
| dktp wrote:
| I think specifically latest Pixels are often Google's beta
| testers. The enthusiasts owning them are happy to get features
| first and won't complain too much if it's rough around the
| edges. The phone is also not big enough revenue driver for them
| to be afraid that too many people would abandon it due to buggy
| new features
|
| Then I assume they'll roll it out further
|
| For better or worse, I do own Pixel 10
| dlcarrier wrote:
| We've reached the point where a program that simply links file
| selection dialog APIs with network identity broadcast and file
| transfer APIs is so difficult to get working, that you can't
| expect it to be functional without the exact specified hardware
| and software version it was written for.
| gostsamo wrote:
| We get the early worm. At the same time, as a screenreader
| user, I wished that I didn't miss the responsiveness and ease
| of use of my old Samsung Galaxy S9+. I fail to comprehend how
| Google managed to make a phone which is harder to use than
| something produced 7 generations ago.
| bigyabai wrote:
| Duopoly _who_?
| prmoustache wrote:
| Aren't most people just sending files over
| whatsapp/signal/whatever instant messaging apps they use?
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| Large files.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| or images, which WhatsApp insists on recompressing, which
| tends to really impact the quality
| Almondsetat wrote:
| Whatsapp doesn't insist anything. You just send the photos
| as files
| swiftcoder wrote:
| You can indeed! For some reason, I'm having trouble
| teaching various relatives how to do that
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| That's my first thought too, as an Android user. But Apple
| culture is about using what's built in, the path of least
| resistance, and Android/Windows are more for tinkerers who seek
| out their favorite solutions from a wide variety of third party
| options.
| Angostura wrote:
| ... and sharing files locally at high speed when you aren't
| on a network
| vscode-rest wrote:
| AirDrop is cool because it works offline with relatively high
| bandwidth using local RF. If you want to wait for you and the
| target to transmit all the data to/from some server 1000 miles
| away (using up your precious bandwidth quota along the way)
| that's always been an option.
| skunkworker wrote:
| I've used it multiple times while hiking and outside normal
| cell phone tower range. Need to transfer 500mb of images and
| videos? easy.
| rconti wrote:
| I just airdropped 130 photos from my phone to my coach and I
| was sure it would take forever. The preparing stage on my
| phone took maybe 10 seconds, and the actual transfer took
| what looked like 2 seconds. I couldn't believe it.
| array_key_first wrote:
| Yes, it turns out computers are extremely fast when we're
| not doing backflips through networks and servers all over
| the country to do simple tasks.
| emaro wrote:
| Another use case is to share pictures with people you just
| met / don't know without giving them your phone number.
| prmoustache wrote:
| I know there are better ways to transfer stuff. I am just
| saying that a majority of people don't tend to use them
| regardless of how easy/compatibles alternatives are.
|
| They naturally choose to transfer stuff from the same app
| that they are using to communicate with others.
| vscode-rest wrote:
| Not everything needs to be tailored only to the most
| trivial use case.
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| Of course, only because Apple and Google did everything in
| their power to prevent people sending files directly between
| devices. When you have a duopoly that splits the population in
| two parts and they can't send files between them, of course
| users will rely on messaging apps to share stuff.
|
| Short story: I did a long trip across two continent with my
| wife. Me with an Android devices, her on iOS. We did backup our
| photos in our own private cloud but guess how we had to quick
| exchange photos while in the wild (no wifi and sometimes no
| network)? We couldn't. Because Google and Apple did everything
| so we couldn't.
|
| Google wants to your data and fought for the cloud. Apple don't
| want Android users to easily partake in some data exchange with
| iOS users (you gotta buy your ticket to their jail). So sad you
| don't realize how backward that is.
| prmoustache wrote:
| I don't think that is the reason. I think people tend to
| choose by default the same app they are communicating on. It
| just feels more natural and straightforward.
|
| The same thing used to happen (and still continues) with
| emails. Even with shared cloud drives synchronized to their
| computers an awful lot of people are still sending files by
| email/teams/ticketing systems.
| pmontra wrote:
| Yes, because it's almost the only cross-platform way to do it.
| It used to be email, then pictures become almost too big to fit
| into attachments (and bandwidth, think about the days of 3G)
| and messages have less friction anyway.
| Marsymars wrote:
| Besides what others have mentioned, it's also nice for moving
| files between your own devices - I use AirDrop all the time for
| transferring files between my iPad and Mac.
| olly994 wrote:
| Just use Wormhole for file transfer. Small and easy to use. I
| have put on all my computers, laptops and phones.
| __jonas wrote:
| 100% of the time when I want to share a file from my phone to
| another phone, the other phone is not owned by me and I can't
| just install some software on it
| polishdude20 wrote:
| Wormhole can be run in the browser easily.
| RenThraysk wrote:
| Yep https://webwormhole.com/
|
| Just needs a WebRTC capable browser.
| polishdude20 wrote:
| The official one is at https://wormhole.app
| __jonas wrote:
| That's cool, I actually didn't know that!
| analog31 wrote:
| Granted, this is an edge case: I'm a musician. I use an Android
| tablet for sheet music. That's great when I have WiFi access,
| otherwise, file transfer is hard. Not impossible, but awkward
| when show time is in 5 minutes and someone has brought some
| brought some new material that they want the band to play.
|
| The almost universal solution is "should have gotten Apple."
| averysmallbird wrote:
| What are the chances that this is made possible because of the
| DMA?
| layer8 wrote:
| Around 1.0, I would say.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| 0, this is reverse engineered AirDrop protocol. Implementations
| have been around for a while, eg: https://github.com/seemoo-
| lab/opendrop
| hu3 wrote:
| If implemntations have been around for a while but it only
| happened now, then it's 99% chance that's it's Apple
| backpedalling and trying to weasel their way around DMA.
|
| They got smoked in court, see ruling at https://ec.europa.eu/
| competition/digital_markets_act/cases/2...
| 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.
| leshenka wrote:
| opendrop works without asking Apple
| rckt wrote:
| At the same time as we have companies trying to push their
| humanoid robots with AI and all, we finally have devices able to
| communicate with each other again. Vendor locking is such a
| stupid thing.
| somanyphotons wrote:
| Am I right to assume that they simply implemented AirDrop without
| discussing with Apple?
| jhogervorst wrote:
| I was wondering the same. Looking at the statements in the
| posts, I think so?
| do_not_redeem wrote:
| Reading between the lines, it seems like Google is playing a
| bit of chess here. Reminds me of the Beeper Mini stunt, except
| this time by a trillion-dollar company they can't just sweep
| under the rug.
|
| > we welcome the opportunity to work with Apple to enable
| "Contacts Only" mode in the future.
|
| > I applaud the effort to open more secure information sharing
| between platforms and encourage Google and Apple to work
| together more on this.
|
| Your move, Apple.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| I am reminded of Microsoft implementing a YouTube app for
| Windows Phone, and Google repeatedly blocking it.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Because Google is an underdog here. In your memory Google
| is Microsoft and Apple is Google.
| somanyphotons wrote:
| I think Apple will be ok with this, it clearly shows Android
| being less capable/compatible than other iPhones, a bit like
| blue/green bubbles
| thewebguyd wrote:
| That's how it reads to me. They made a big deal during the
| Pixel 10 launch to talk about Apple/iOS features, and
| switching from iPhone to Pixel. They called the blue/green
| bubbles childish, and they put Magasafe in the Pixel and
| explicitly said "you can use all your Apple accessories."
|
| Google is going hard after iPhone users by trying to punch
| holes in Apple's walled garden anytime they can. AirDrop is
| another hole in the wall, as was Magsafe, and RCS.
|
| If Google can get other AWDL features working between macOS
| and Android, particularly universal clipboard and universal
| control, I'd seriously consider switching back to Android
| after many, many years on iOS purely for the ecosystem
| integration. iMessage doesn't bother me, but I use AirDrop,
| AirPods auto switching on calls, and universal clipboard
| daily and those are all blockers for my considering a switch.
| rescbr wrote:
| I remember reading somewhere Apple had/has to make AirDrop
| interoperable due to EU's DMA.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Well since absolutely no one buys Pixeld to a first
| approximation and mostly in the US. Looking at different
| sites it's from 3-6% marketshare.
|
| I doubt this was done for the DMA.
| input_sh wrote:
| > Developers will be able to integrate alternative
| solutions to Apple's AirDrop and AirPlay services on the
| iPhone. As a result, iPhone users will be able to choose
| from different and innovative services to share files with
| other users and cast media content from their iPhones to
| TVs.
|
| https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/questions-and-
| answe...
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| You realize that doesn't say what you think it says _in
| your own quote of the citation_?
|
| Apple has to allow alternate solutions on the iPhone -
| not that they have to allow AirDrop interoperability.
| concinds wrote:
| That's a different thing, but the EU _did_ force Apple to
| implement Wi-Fi Aware which is what allows Google to do
| this.
| gumby271 wrote:
| But this works with the existing airdrop client on the
| iOS side right? Did Apple change airdrop to use wifi
| aware, and now Google can build the airdrop protocol on
| Android?
| input_sh wrote:
| Feel free to click on a PDF directly below that quote, I
| don't have to serve you everything on a silver platter.
|
| I promise you you will find what you're looking for right
| there.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| So you posted a citation supposedly refuting my comment
| then when you are called out about it instead of
| admitting you misinterpreted your own citation, you say
| "look somewhere else"...
| input_sh wrote:
| So instead of admitting you were wrong and that DMA did
| indeed strongarm Apple into doing this, you're doing
| what? Arguing I should've given you a different quote
| with that info instead of a primary source I've already
| linked to you?
|
| Weird man, weird.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Well first you were wrong - and your quote shows that you
| didn't understand what you were quoting. The EU never
| forced Apple to have interoperability with AirDrop. It
| had to support the standard WiFI protocol to allow other
| apps to be installed on the iPhone that could duplicate
| its functionally. It's "weird" that you don't see the
| difference.
|
| It's also weird that you could take the time to deflect
| and respond twice and not find the quote that backs up
| your (false) assertion.
| tencentshill wrote:
| So is Airdrop now less secure or private? I don't trust any
| standard Google had their hands in.
| dlcarrier wrote:
| I don't think it's possible for it to get less secure or
| private.
| rescbr wrote:
| Eh... there is an open source AirDrop implementation, it's
| 6 years old now.
|
| https://github.com/seemoo-lab/opendrop
| wiseowise wrote:
| First time I hear about Google tech being insecure or not
| private. Sure they siphon all the info THEMSELVES, but
| never have I heard about them implementing insecure
| protocols.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| > but never have I heard about them implementing insecure
| protocols.
|
| That's because they don't. Google takes security
| seriously. There's a reason GrapheneOS is only supported
| on Pixel devices currently as well, because of certain
| hardware security features.
|
| Nothing you do with Google is private _from Google_ but
| it 's certainly designed to belong only to Google, your
| data is one of their most important assets. Of course
| they are going to secure it and prevent others besides
| themselves from getting or using it.
|
| It's the most common misconception with Google, that they
| "sell your information." They don't, they never have.
| They use your info, aggregated with all other Google
| users, to sell targeting for ads. They don't sell the
| actual data.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| It is more precise to say, that they sell the idea, that
| they know better due to the fact that they have the data
| about you.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| Yeah. They sell access to you, so an advertiser can tell
| Google "I want this shown to a mid-thirties tech worker
| living in SF who likes x,y,z and frequents traveling to
| q" and Google will show you their ad.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| > Nothing you do with Google is private from Google but
| it's certainly designed to belong only to Google
|
| The same also goes for Apple, although Apple doesn't
| monetize your data as much so they collect less. They'll
| suck up all kinds of data out of your devices but will
| strictly protect that data from third party applications
| any way they can. They're also willing to use that
| protection to prevent interoperability or integration
| with third-party devices.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| Yeah, Apple collects a lot of the same stuff.
|
| The difference for me is in the business model, and the
| fact that Apple offers true E2E encryption for photos
| while Google doesn't. If Google ever made their own
| version of Advanced Data Protection for Pixel phones,
| it'd be a wash.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Apple does pose more private defaults, though they will
| easily steer your towards "make backups encrypted with a
| key we also know in case you lose your password", which
| isn't much more private than Google's proposition.
|
| When Google announced their AI hardware features, I was
| hoping they they'd implement the same offline/encrypted
| photo indexing that iOS does, rather than shoving
| everything through the cloud. Unfortunately, Google
| Photos seems as bad as ever.
|
| On the other hand, setting up automatic backups and photo
| sync towards a self-hosted Immich/Photoprism instance is
| a lot easier on Android than on iOS in my experience,
| despite Google's reluctance to grant storage permissions
| to apps.
|
| Google does actually have a kind of extended protection
| (https://developer.android.com/privacy-and-
| security/advanced-...), but that feeds more data to
| Google rather than less: it basically has you trust
| Google to protect you, by having Google pre-scan your
| browsing and locking down your account. If you're
| American, that may be worth it if you trust Google
| enough. It's a combination of Lockdown Mode and Advanced
| Protection Mode on iOS.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Did you read the security analysis that was done on this
| implementation?
| Nextgrid wrote:
| On every Apple interoperability thread this argument comes
| up and at this point I'm convinced it's part of some
| coordinated effort; surely no one can be that clueless to
| actually believe this, especially on a technical forum?
|
| AirDrop is a peer-to-peer protocol, both the recipient and
| initiator need to explicitly take action, and even in
| Apple's implementation provides no authentication
| (recipient device is chosen by name, which anyone can
| change in their settings app). There is no way the
| existence of this Android client would reduce Airdrop
| security on iOS.
|
| Do you also believe that TLS between an Apple device and a
| Windows device not secure either, since the Windows device
| uses a different, non-Apple-sanctioned TLS implementation,
| and the mere existence of which would somehow weaken
| Apple's TLS stack?
| 63stack wrote:
| The walled garden is breached, run for the hills!
| amelius wrote:
| How long until Apple disables it outside of the EU?
| jack_tripper wrote:
| They won't, they'll just do another Green-Bubble/Blue-
| Bubble shenanigan to signal when Apple royalty is
| transferring a file with an unwashed Android peasant via a
| gimped experience.
| brokenmachine wrote:
| There's teams of people having meetings about how they
| can degrade people's experience right now.
| trollbridge wrote:
| And if Google does this as well as the RCS rollout, I can look
| forward to attempts to use AirDrop to send me viruses and other
| spammy junk.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| AirDrop & QuickShare are "contacts only" by default. You have
| to explicitly enable "receive from anyone" and it's only
| active for 10 minutes.
|
| The old days of being able to AirDrop something to everyone
| on a plane because it was set to "everyone" by default are
| over.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| If it was profitable to spam bad things using AirDrop, bad
| guys would just buy iPhones and use them to spam. No
| alternative implementations necessary.
| standardUser wrote:
| Key quote from The Verge article:
|
| When we asked Google whether it developed this feature with or
| without Apple's involvement, Moriconi confirmed it was not a
| collab. "We accomplished this through our own implementation,"
| he tells The Verge. "Our implementation was thoroughly vetted
| by our own privacy and security teams, and we also engaged a
| third party security firm to pentest the solution." Google
| didn't exactly answer our question when we asked how the
| company anticipated Apple responding to the development;
| Moriconi only says that "...we always welcome collaboration
| opportunities to address interoperability issues between iOS
| and Android."
|
| https://www.theverge.com/news/825228/iphone-airdrop-android-...
| Krasnol wrote:
| You're right.
|
| There is a different article with a comment by google here:
|
| https://www.theverge.com/news/825228/iphone-airdrop-android-...
|
| > Update, November 20th: Added a quote from a Google
| spokesperson confirming that Apple was not involved in the
| development of this feature.
| reactormonk wrote:
| Shoutout to https://localsend.org/ - it can even open a local
| webserver if needed.
| aagha wrote:
| I prefer https://pairdrop.net/ ; nicer interface
| 85392_school wrote:
| To continue the thread, my favorite is https://drop.lol
| serial_dev wrote:
| I'm using FilePizza when I need it, saw it on HN recently.
| All this AI magic allegedly taking our jobs, but we still
| can't transfer files from one device to another, or print a
| document reliably.
|
| https://file.pizza/
| doublerabbit wrote:
| > we still can't transfer files from one device to
| another
|
| Nor send text message with images.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Or react to images sent by those that can.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| Is replying not enough? I always feel like react is a
| lazy way to avoid replying
| kulahan wrote:
| A text is already a lazy way to avoid speaking.
| recursive wrote:
| One level of laziness should be enough for anyone.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| idk, for me text is more hard. talk is easiest. voice
| messages is top lazy and I hate them.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| reactions are richer than a word
| throwaway290 wrote:
| what about two words
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| A well placed react can be quality comedy. Also very easy
| way to communicate to somebody you saw what they sent/are
| doing what they asked.
| mulmen wrote:
| Why would a _text_ message support _images_?
| catlikesshrimp wrote:
| Drop.lol works in android-firefox. File.pizza isn't, for
| me.
| eitally wrote:
| I've been very happy with Blip. My use case is to share
| processed photos from my MacBook to my Pixel to use for
| Social sharing. It's super-fast, especially when the
| devices are on the same LAN.
| Hnaomyiph wrote:
| To continue to continue the thread relaysecret.com and
| relaysecret.com/tunnel Found it on hn years ago, still use
| it all the time. Perfect replacement for Firefox send, rip
| sellmesoap wrote:
| What about b.o.b.? https://bob.osau.re/
| worldsavior wrote:
| It's slow as suffering in hell.
| quadsteel wrote:
| Really? It has been by far the fastest and simplest option
| I've found and use across all my devices these days. Not that
| I looked very deep though, like pairdrop and such.
|
| So what's better than this?
| layer8 wrote:
| LocalSend requires the devices to be on the same local network.
| TFA is about file sharing using a direct device-to-device
| wireless connection.
| rollcat wrote:
| We've had ad-hoc WiFi for about 3 decades, but that requires
| a level of device access that no gatekeeper will agree to
| anymore.
| gumby271 wrote:
| Well, one gatekeeper. Wifi direct/aware seems to work fine
| outside of iOS and Mac os.
| layer8 wrote:
| It is now supported bey iOS as well, thanks to the EU:
| https://developer.apple.com/documentation/WiFiAware
| jeroenhd wrote:
| WiFi Direct has been in Android for at least a decade,
| maybe even a decade and a half: https://developer.android.c
| om/develop/connectivity/wifi/wifi...
|
| The code was added to Android with Android 4.0 back in
| 2011.
|
| You can check for WiFi Direct networks manually in Settings
| > Network & internet > Internet > Network preferences >
| Wifi Direct. If you live in a city, you can probably find
| one or two printers in the neighbourhood advertising a WiFi
| Direct channel you can use to print over.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Not the same.
| energy123 wrote:
| +1. Easy to use and works on every platform. Also supports
| sending plain text between your devices (into clipboard of
| recipient).
| bbx wrote:
| One of those apps that "just works". Been using it recently to
| share files between an Android phone and my Mac. Turns out it
| works better than Airdrop itself when I couldn't send a file
| from my iPhone to my Mac. Great user experience as well.
| hshdhdhj4444 wrote:
| Of course, AirDrop is absolutely awful.
|
| Is the Android equivalent any better?
| sahaskatta wrote:
| Curious, why do you think AirDrop is so bad?
|
| As for Android, it works fine, but I've probably used that
| feature only once in the past ten years. I haven't seen others
| use it either.
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| AirDrop works very infrequently for me. I will open AirDrop
| and not see someone who's sitting right next to me, or then
| I'll send them the file and it'll get stuck on "waiting" and
| they'll never get the notification, or it'll send some of the
| files then seem to get stuck partway through.
|
| This is all with modern day iPhones, like iPhone 15 and
| above, and just using it in what should be the happy path.
| I'm actually really surprised every time I hear people say
| it's so good, because I almost always have to end up just
| imessaging a picture instead and finding that it works much
| better.
| Melatonic wrote:
| I've had the same issue as a more recent iOS convert.
|
| I remembering looking into it and I think there's actually
| two forms of airdrop - one is local only (I think it
| negotiates over Bluetooth then does actual transfer over a
| direct WiFi connection). The other is a fallback or
| something and goes over cellular.
|
| And for some reason it seems to always want to fall back to
| cellular when you have one bar of shit 3G in the middle of
| nowhere and are trying to send your friend 2 feet away a
| shitload of photos from your trip.
| jddecker wrote:
| One thing I like about Android Quick Send is that you can
| generate a QR code, that the other person scans, and it'll send
| the file to them. I use it so rarely, and most people I know
| are the same, so usually it's just turned off and I find a lot
| of other Android users are the same.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Airdrop is great when it works.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| Long overdue, there should really be an open standard for
| wireless sharing of files. Windows? macOS? Linux? Android? iOS?
| Switch2? PS5? Doesn't matter, just open the wireless file
| transfer window and it should just work. Having to install third-
| party apps for such basic functionality is ridiculous.
|
| If we had a functional government every major tech CEO would get
| called by congress, grilled about this bullshit, and told to sort
| it out unless they want to get some bullshit legislation shoved
| down their throat.
| nicolaslem wrote:
| I am with you. How is it that in the past we got major
| successes like TCP/IP, 802.3, HTTP and WiFi but somehow in the
| past decade big tech decided that was too much collaboration
| and it would be better for everyone to stop doing that?
| thewebguyd wrote:
| > big tech
|
| That's why.
|
| TCP/IP was DARPA, so publicly (taxpayer) funded. The first
| HTTPd was public domain. WiFi was a bit of a combo of Vic
| Hayes & Bell Labs, IEEE and a research org so not exactly a
| public or public domain project.
|
| Big tech and profit/rent seeking is literally the problem.
| Things don't interoperate because it's not profitable for
| them to interoperate.
|
| We stopped undertaking large public works projects in tech
| and outsourced it all to private companies. Big tech is
| literally the problem.
|
| This is why free and open source software is so important.
|
| How different would things look if httpd wasn't public
| domain, and Tim instead started a tech company, made it
| proprietary, etc.
| j1elo wrote:
| So does this constitute an example that the liberal ideal
| of companies competing for the best product -with no or
| minimal amount of public money forced to go this way for
| public development- ends up becoming basically a miserable
| and lacking experience for end users during decades?
| (admittedly it sounds to me like if private companies had
| invented TCP-IP, the consequences would basically be
| terrible connectivity products nowadays)
| thewebguyd wrote:
| I don't necessarily think so. It doesn't have to be this
| way. The problem is big tech doesn't have any incentive
| to compete to make the best product because there's no
| market pressure to do so.
|
| We've failed, over the past ~25+ years to do any
| meaningful trust busting and allowed monopolies and
| duopolies to abuse their market positions and destroy any
| potential competitors.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Seriously this should be a thing. Would be so much easier.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Is the benefit transferring "local" via BT instead of across the
| internet as a text message attachment? Because I do the latter
| plenty, but pretty much never AirDrop anything to anybody, even
| if they're sitting next to me.
| t-writescode wrote:
| I AirDrop files between my different Apple devices pretty
| regularly.. I guess everyone has their own system for doing
| things.
| jampa wrote:
| I used them. Compression is an issue in other protocols
| (sending via WhatsApp, for example). Another benefit is that
| photos sent by Airdrop get automatically backed up. It also
| works well in areas with poor internet connectivity. For
| example, some beaches have weak cellphone signals due to their
| surroundings, so when meeting friends, we generally use
| Airdrop.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| AirDrop uses P2P wifi for the actual transfer which can make it
| significantly faster than transferring through the internet,
| which makes a big difference for photos, videos, and other
| large files. It also works out in the middle of a forest where
| there are no wireless connections as well as it works in the
| middle of NYC.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| It's great. I used it to move entire folders from my Mac to
| an account-less iPad with no Internet connection.
|
| I thought it was going to be slow, but hundreds of gigabytes
| was fully transferred in less than a minute.
| Eduard wrote:
| > hundreds of gigabytes was fully transferred in less than
| a minute.
|
| yeah right
| Analemma_ wrote:
| If it was a few large files as opposed to many small
| ones, this is totally believable. iPhones have Wi-Fi 6E
| chips, and an ad hoc network where the devices are right
| next to each other can actually reach the theoretical max
| speed of the protocol (as opposed to real-world
| connections to a base station, which never do). I've
| never measured it precisely but I've transferred ~1 GB
| disk images over AirDrop in a couple seconds.
| interpol_p wrote:
| It's fast, but it's not that fast.
|
| My son regularly borrows my iPhone 14 Pro for shooting
| video, and I inevitably have to do a large AirDrop transfer
| to him of all his footage. We usually see about 10 GB per
| minute, which is really fast
| j1elo wrote:
| I'm sitting in the beach with no data connectivity whatsoever,
| much less any WiFi network anywhere close; my partner just
| asked me to send a copy of the photos we just took with my
| phone 10 mins ago. That's the use case. Not outside reach of a
| WiFi or 4G network much for you, then?
|
| Another easy example of use case is wanting to share a file
| during a flight or while being overseas on a boat.
| bochoh wrote:
| It seems that this is directional, flowing from Android to Apple
| but not necessarily back (e.g., me airdropping a photo to my
| parent who uses Android). I'd love for this to work in the other
| direction as well.
| somehnguy wrote:
| The demo shows it working both ways, so you're in luck
| evanreichard wrote:
| The video shows both directions.
| emaro wrote:
| There's a gif on the blog showing file sharing in both
| directions. Apparently "Contacts only" sharing doesn't work
| yet, as mentioned in another comment:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45995586
| commandersaki wrote:
| I came to the same conclusion when I clicked the link to try it
| out, just watching the video now to verify that the flow is
| both ways.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Around 2008 I saw two girls, not too versed in technology, share
| a mp3 song over bluetooth. At the time I thought that if
| technology finally arrived at the point where "normal people"
| could be able to do things that required lots of technical
| knowledge just a few years ago then we were very close to a
| future where technology could be a giant enabler of powers to
| everyone.
|
| I am really ashamed by how wrong I was and how WE allowed things
| to became so artificially limited.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| In high school (2003-2007) it was super easy for any of my
| friends and I (varying technical levels) to send arbitrarily
| large files to each other with AOL Instant Messenger's Direct
| Connect. Honestly not even sure how a non-technical person
| would do that nowadays.
| DANmode wrote:
| They wouldn't.
|
| This is intentional.
| Telaneo wrote:
| The closest I've seen is 'send file over message service or
| e-mail', but this has a decently low maximum file size.
|
| The alternative for larger files is Dropbox or Google Drive
| or similar and share a link, but there are limits to how full
| you can have those be, so sending a 5 GB file might be
| inconvenient if you don't pay for the upgraded service.
|
| For anything larger than that again, I don't think I would do
| anything than pass a physical flash drive, since there's
| nothing else that has a lower barrier of entry and I can rely
| on a random person to be able to use and understand.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| I have upgraded dropbox and google accounts and also a VPS,
| so it wouldn't be hard for me. But for people who aren't
| big fucking nerds, nothing exists that's as easy as that.
| Email's limit is crazy low.
| array_key_first wrote:
| Nowadays it's done by uploading something to Google drive and
| then sharing the link so someone can then download it.
|
| Expensive, overly complex, and stupidly slow.
| DANmode wrote:
| and deeply surveil-able.
| fsh wrote:
| In Europe, people use WhatsApp for this. Ridiculous to go
| through a chat app for this, but it works.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| You might enjoy this new initiative:
| https://aol.codeberg.page/eci/
| SchemaLoad wrote:
| Sadly for "normal people" you just share links now. You don't
| have an MP3 to even send.
| theoldgreybeard wrote:
| Nice.
|
| I can also recommend LocalSend.
| lazyeye wrote:
| The Localsend app is the way
|
| https://localsend.org/
| layer8 wrote:
| LocalSend requires devices to be on the same local network,
| which this doesn't, it establishes a direct Wi-Fi connection.
| marcodiego wrote:
| If you're using android, you can easily share files over local
| network (or using your phone as hotspot) with this app:
| https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.MarcosDiez.shareviahttp/
|
| If you're not close, telegram fork allow easy sharing of files
| too.
| hackernewds wrote:
| but I have to download and app which is the same as downloading
| Google drive
| thewebguyd wrote:
| and more importantly, AirDrop works without network, it's
| P2P. There's situations where the devices you want to share
| to/from aren't on the same network or can't put them on the
| same network for various reasons.
| adenta wrote:
| Now we just need universal clipboard between Android and OSX
| emaro wrote:
| Fucking finally. I just really hope is also lands in AOSP and
| will be available on all Android phones in the future.
| dlcarrier wrote:
| Why is this part of the OS?
| flexagoon wrote:
| Because it can't be implemented without low level hardware
| access. But also, it seems like it's a part of GMS, not of the
| OS itself.
| dlcarrier wrote:
| Low level hardware access for opening a file and a network
| port? Those are some of the first lessons in any programming
| tutorial. If they aren't available, what is the OS even
| doing?
|
| Also, for all intents and purposes, GMS is part of the
| Android OS, but Google had to branch it off, to keep it
| closed source.
| spiznnx wrote:
| AirDrop doesn't open a network port, it creates a WiFi
| Aware advertisement and a WiFi Direct connection. However I
| thought this also should not need OS-level changes, just
| android.permission.NEARBY_WIFI_DEVICES permission.
| Aman_Kalwar wrote:
| Finally! Interoperability like this should've existed years ago.
| Curious how they're handling privacy & bandwidth
| kgwxd wrote:
| Until they decide we can't again.
| happosai wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/949/
|
| ...still relevant
| layer8 wrote:
| This is based on Wi-Fi Aware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-
| Fi_Alliance#Wi-Fi_Aware
|
| 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...
| josephg wrote:
| This is great! I notice that's on the ditto blog. I can see why
| the ditto developers are watching with keen eyes!
|
| 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.
| apitman wrote:
| I really hope we see a resurgence in local-first networking.
| My wife and I can't even play a LAN game of Age of Empires 2
| on a plane unless the flight has wifi.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| AoE2 is not known for great network code, so I think the
| hopes for that specifically are pretty slim.
| apitman wrote:
| The irony is that the netcode is excellent now, but
| locked to proprietary platforms.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Is it really excellent? I mean, the game still FPS drops,
| when only one person in a multiplayer match is lagging.
| But maybe that could be attributed to engine problems,
| rather than network code issues.
|
| 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 ...
| apitman wrote:
| That's just been my experience. LAN especially seems rock
| solid, once it's going. All sorts of issues getting it to
| connect sometimes. Definitely lag sometimes online.
|
| 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/ag
| eofempires/comments/16aowwc/are_t...
| Orphis wrote:
| Which app are you using?
| pzo wrote:
| It's interesting that apple released 3rd party Wi-Fi Aware SDK
| for iOS and iPadOS but no for MacOS...
| praseodym wrote:
| MacOS doesn't have a gatekeeper status in the Digital Markets
| Act (DMA), so Apple doesn't need to provide it. This shows
| that they only provide the SDK because of regulatory
| pressure, and try to maintain their vendor lock-in where
| possible.
| manquer wrote:
| Not necessarily, Since 2015 launch NAN has been vaporware
| outside android, nobody else support it. Windows does not
| do so today either [1].
|
| 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
| josephg wrote:
| Look, you might be right. But you might be wrong. We don't
| know for sure.
|
| 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.
| DrammBA wrote:
| Your reply makes sense in a vacuum, but in reality we
| have the context of having seen Apple comply with
| regulation maliciously before, so we do know for sure
| that there's no macOS in the sdk because they weren't
| forced to by regulation.
| josephg wrote:
| > we do know for sure that there's no macOS in the sdk
| because they weren't forced to by regulation.
|
| 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.
| latexr wrote:
| I largely agree with you but want to highlight a few
| points.
|
| > 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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_File_System
| saagarjha wrote:
| It's a few million page views on the front page and a
| small fraction commenting.
| latexr wrote:
| Again, what's the source of the data? Anyone can throw
| around vague numbers. "A few million" and "a small
| fraction" provide no useful information for the context.
| tkel wrote:
| Pretty sure that ditto article is written by AI ... there's an
| entire section dedicated to the imagined 5.0 spec..
| felipeerias wrote:
| I was experimenting with this technology almost a decade ago as
| part of my work as interaction designer:
|
| 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.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| Waayy back in 2009 we had Bump [1], which allowed transfer
| between devices and later web apps as well - by banging your
| phone against the spacebar. It worked 98% of the time and was
| faster than AirDrop is today, even though we only had 3G.
|
| Google acquired it and immediately killed it.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bump_(application)
| 0xfaded wrote:
| Waaay back when in Japan, sekigaisen (infrared) was a verb
| meaning to transfer contact details or photos or whatever
| between phones via infrared. It was amazing how fast the
| iPhone took over Japan and killed off their quirky phone
| ecosystem.
|
| Edit: want to emphasize that it was totally ubiquitous.
| Every phone has it
| parl_match wrote:
| yes, "beaming" in the us was also used for quite a while.
| as in IR beam
|
| 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
| vel0city wrote:
| My friends in school would send ringtones, wallpapers,
| and other small files through Bluetooth. It normally
| worked pretty well no matter the device.
| ehnto wrote:
| I remember being blown away by the Gameboy Colour IR
| link. You could use it to trade Pokemon. That makes a bit
| more sense now if sekigaisen was already a popular
| ecosystem.
| edbaskerville wrote:
| In the US (edit: and elsewhere!), "beaming" worked great
| between Apple Newton devices, including the pretty cool
| eMate 300 (an early Jony Ive creation, I just found on
| Wikipedia).
|
| In 1993.
| onlyhumans wrote:
| Microsoft Zune had the ability to send music wirelessly
| to other Zunes, it was called squirting
| tempfile wrote:
| That's appalling. "Yo let me squirt you"
| type0 wrote:
| Somehow "squirting their users" perfectly defines
| Microsoft to this day
| throawayonthe wrote:
| squirt me bro
| Lutzb wrote:
| I wonder if this was driven by the Palm Pilots in the
| early 2000s. We beamed contacts, calendar entries, whole
| apps via IR. At trade shows exhibitors had terminals that
| would constantly send out contact informations via OBEX
| (?).
| cachius wrote:
| And in Pokemon Gold/Silver/Crystal on GameBoy Color you
| could send Mystery gifts via IR!
|
| Someone even ported it to an emulator!
| https://shonumi.github.io/articles/art11.html
| lgvld wrote:
| Very cool, didn't know such app had existed, thank you!
| Wanted to use a similar approach to connect people in a
| smaller friends-only social network.
| jmb99 wrote:
| I can almost guarantee it wasn't faster than airdrop (when
| it works) is today. I remember using bump on wifi, and it
| was limited to (shocking) wifi speeds at the time. I have
| as recently as last week transferred 1GB video files in
| under 20 seconds using airdrop. That simply was not
| possible in 2009.
| nickphx wrote:
| airdrop uses wifi direct... so
| ricardobeat wrote:
| Connection speed, not transfer speed indeed - that was
| purely network dependent. In any case nobody was
| transferring 1GB files from their phones at the time :)
| Affric wrote:
| Bump was like magic.
|
| The only app I have ever truly thought "this is the future"
| varenc wrote:
| Bump didn't use direct device-to-device communication. A
| central server correlated the two bumping phones, based on
| geolocation and accelerometer data, then swapped the data
| via the server. At least that's how it worked in the early
| days. (Wiki page confirms)
|
| 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.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| That's true, I should have mentioned it did not use
| device-to-device communication. It was the best possible
| experience for the time though, BT was not viable and
| wifi direct did not exist. 3G averaged at maybe 10Mbps,
| and photos were 2 megapixels (if you had a camera at
| all), more than enough speed. We were mostly sharing URLs
| and contacts.
|
| 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.
| SchemaLoad wrote:
| What's sad is what largely replaced device to device
| transfers was just messaging apps. But messaging apps
| compress media horribly. iMessage isn't so bad, but send a
| photo through almost anything else and all meta data is
| stripped, and the image resolution and bitrate are the
| absolute bare minimum to look ok on a phone. But try to
| print it and it will be horrible.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| > iMessage isn't so bad
|
| 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
| darkwater wrote:
| There could probably be a niche market (until platforms
| implement the functionality) for enhancing the metadata
| of Whatsapp pictures from family & friends and guess it
| from the context. i.e. your auntie sending you now a
| picture of yourself 30 years ago which will show up as
| dated 2025 by default, which totally sucks.
| givinguflac wrote:
| Your comment reminded me of this:
|
| https://theyseeyourphotos.com/
| padraic7a wrote:
| Stripping the metadata on a photo is probably a feature
| though. For privacy reasons the default should most
| likely be that location, device info etc are taken out of
| photos that might go viral or be shared beyond what the
| original user intended.
| abustamam wrote:
| When I was pretty early in my career, I inherited a legacy
| project from the CTO who didn't want to maintain it
| anymore. We decided as a team that I'd just recreate the
| project with a modern tool chain.
|
| 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.
| joquarky wrote:
| I changed my thoughts on rewriting after reading this:
|
| https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-
| should-...
|
| PS: I just realized this article is older than some of
| the people here.
| skydhash wrote:
| I would rewrite if the alternative is maintaining bad
| code for a long time. But yeah, it's best to be
| pessimistic. And be really careful about changes. There
| are books written about the methods to use.
| abustamam wrote:
| Wow! Not quite older than me, but my age was in the
| single digits :)
|
| Thanks for sharing, it's always great to learn from folks
| who have been through it for literal decades.
| skydhash wrote:
| The lesson I retain from a similar endeavor is that you
| should document all the usecase of a module or a project
| before rewriting them. And that task can be as exhausting
| as formally verifying the module.
| abustamam wrote:
| Yeah, it could be several weeks or even months before
| even writing a single line of code depending on size of
| project. Important to do, but PMs would be a hard to sell
| that to :(
|
| (Ideally these things are written while the code is being
| written but let's be honest, we rarely keep those up to
| date)
| felipeerias wrote:
| If I am not mistaken, Bump still required a connection to
| the Internet. WiFi Aware does not, because the phones
| create an ad-hoc link on the spot.
|
| The connection can be very fast. In this example, a 280 MB
| file is transferred in less than 10 seconds:
|
| https://vimeo.com/418946837
| pjc50 wrote:
| I do wonder how many great little user-friendly bits of
| software got destroyed in aquishutdowns. Incredible way to
| deploy capital to delete software, but that's the big
| internet world for you.
| lxgr wrote:
| > Waayy back in 2009 we had Bump [1], which allowed
| transfer between devices and later web apps as well
|
| 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.
| saubeidl wrote:
| _Thank you for the pro-consumer regulation, EU._
| dguest wrote:
| Crazy what those kooky Europeans do. Now if I have a friend,
| I can
|
| - 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...
|
| [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Is it actually? Apple supports AirDrop over Wi-Fi Aware? Any
| source or confirmation?
| jjtech wrote:
| I'm pretty sure this is just incorrect. According to the linked
| report[1], they tested it for compatibility with OpenDrop, so I
| think they simply implemented AWDL.
|
| 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...
| gumby271 wrote:
| That's what was confusing to me. It's one thing for Apple to
| add wifi aware by force, it would be another for them to
| completely reimplement Airdrop with it. I don't think they
| were required to do that.
| shaky-carrousel wrote:
| They were required to drop AWDL, yes. They had to
| reimplement AirDrop.
|
| https://www.ditto.com/blog/cross-platform-p2p-wi-fi-how-
| the-...
| jeroenhd wrote:
| They weren't specifically required to drop AWDL, they
| were just required to implement WiFi-Aware in such a
| manner that neither technology had an advantage.
|
| 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.
| cowsandmilk wrote:
| > In theory Apple could've maintained both, but that
| seems like a waste of development time to me.
|
| 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.
| gumby271 wrote:
| So does Mac OS support Wifi Aware now? I didn't think so,
| which is confusing if Airdrop still works between iOS and
| Mac OS.
| acedTrex wrote:
| They are not required to drop awdl, they just have to
| support wifi aware as well.
| shaky-carrousel wrote:
| In the last link provided by parent you can read:
|
| > 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.
| artursapek wrote:
| It's hilarious that such a simple thing has taken this long for
| the world to build, and it's only because Apple was forced to
| allow it.
| sneak wrote:
| Apple's users bought iPhones en masse without them having
| this feature.
| artursapek wrote:
| I understand that. But "this feature" is simply sending a
| file around between the two big mobile operating systems.
| It's absurd to me how this is a big product launch in 2025.
| troupo wrote:
| Oh, I fully expect Apple to have a hissy fit about this.
| <queue in incoherent ramblings about privacy and user choice
| in 3... 2... 1...>
| archon810 wrote:
| Do we know for a fact that DMA has anything to do with it?
| According to Google, Apple had nothing to do with this
| announcement. The way I have read it is a bunch of Google
| hackers reverse engineered Airdrop and that's that. And it's
| coming to other Android devices, so the Pixel 10 lock-in is
| just a marketing move.
| pdpi wrote:
| The DMA forced Apple to move all of their P2P Wi-Fi stuff
| from their proprietary AWDL stack to the current Wi-Fi Aware-
| based implementation. Whatever work Google did to reverse
| engineer Airdrop was based on the Wi-Fi Aware implementation
| of Airdrop, rather than the older AWDL. They didn't get the
| whole stack for free, but it's not nothing either.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Do we have proof this actually happened, or theorising
| based on EU requirements?
| pdpi wrote:
| You can read the actual ruling at https://ec.europa.eu/co
| mpetition/digital_markets_act/cases/2...
|
| 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.
|
| (N.B. The decision calls it "iOS 19" because it predates
| Apple announcing that "iOS 19" would actually be called
| iOS 26)
|
| 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.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| But does Apple use/allow Airdrop over Wi-Fi Aware? It's
| not clear to me that's something they shipped.
| pdpi wrote:
| From the same article I linked: 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.
|
| (SS5.7 is 13 pages of exquisitely detailed requirements
| for Airdrop interop)
|
| 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.
| rafaelcosta wrote:
| AirDrop works via AWDL, I think you're just wrong...
| shaky-carrousel wrote:
| Not anymore.
| prettymuchnoone wrote:
| but if airdrop as of OS26 uses wifi aware, and the
| proprietary awdl version has been shuttered due to the eu
| regulation, how come devices on that software version can
| still airdrop to older devices?
| amelius wrote:
| At this point I don't even want to share files with Apple users.
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| In some ways we're gone backwards. Sharing MP3 via Bluetooth on
| non-smart phones in 2007 was a common event when I was at school,
| that and burning CDs.
| keane wrote:
| Possibly relevant comment from a few years ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26893693
|
| _> AirDrop also shares your full name (seemingly the one
| associated with your Apple ID, not what you have set for yourself
| in your contacts), both by displaying it in the sharing interface
| on the involved devices and by attaching it as an extended
| attribute to uploaded files._
|
| _> So if you AirDrop some files to your computer and then zip
| them up, anyone you send that zip to (a journalist, a public
| file-hosting site, w/e) will have your full legal name to go with
| them._
|
| Linked article from that thread is moved to
| https://medium.com/@kieczkowska/introduction-to-airdrop-fore...
| (but is archived).
|
| I wonder if Google is adding metadata as well. Otherwise there
| does seem to be the problem of, for example, threats being
| AirDropped in a public place.
| hoherd wrote:
| Using macOS 26 and iOS 26 I was unable to reproduce their
| findings. I airdropped a photo from my iOS device to my laptop,
| and nothing in `mdls`, `xattr -l`, `exiftool -s`, `rg -i`
| showed my name.
| lathiat wrote:
| It wouldn't surprise if Apple had fixed this, it's the sortof
| thing they would fix, but it may be worth trying with 2
| devices not from the same iCloud account. Wouldn't surprise
| me if the code paths were subtly different in that case.
| quitit wrote:
| They would seem to contain identifiers as law enforcement
| have been able to follow up on instances where there has
| been airdropping of perverse images, but as noted by others
| the files don't include names.
|
| The problem with airdrop (and likely why the 10 minute
| setting now exists) is that it includes a preview image as
| part of the notification request.
|
| So other than being able to subject someone to perverse
| images, preview images have also been used in state-
| sponsored zero-click attacks to infect the phones of their
| targets. While that vector seems to be muted for now, the
| 10 minute setting provides a layer of defence against both
| potential future zero-clicks and receiving unsolicited
| previews images.
| NaomiLehman wrote:
| Just a tip - You can put any string as your name for your Apple
| ID. you can also change it at any time. I have it as Mac Book.
| It's not checked when making any credit card payment, AFAIK.
| buildbot wrote:
| Is anything but the zip code actually checked ever? Besides
| the number and cv2 or whatever.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| Number, date (though I never bothered to check if it's
| actually checked, besides stupid frontend shenanigans when
| I couldn't enter it because it had a whole whooping month
| ahead of the current date) and CVC.
|
| As soon as I learned what BANK NAME is acceptable name I
| used it almost everywhere.
| dizzant wrote:
| I've never heard of this. Are you saying I could enter
| "MyLocal Bank" as the payer name instead of my own when
| transacting online with a credit card? This seems like
| the kind of fact that should be essential privacy
| knowledge if true!
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| Well, try it. But don't blame if some over zealous
| merchant would deny you without refund despite receiving
| you money.
| jeromegv wrote:
| This might not work super well if your package is
| crossing border either. Sure it's your billing address
| and not your shipping address, but sometimes they are all
| the same.
| neoecos wrote:
| No. Credit card transactions cannot check for name or
| billing a part from the zip code. Also the zip code
| validation only works in certain countries like the US, and
| Canada.
|
| The way to validate that works is Visa 3DS or MasterCard 3D
| Secure. Those sent an OTP from the issuer to the cardholder
| on the issuer database, usually an email or SMS. The issuer
| of the card is the only who really knows the owner of the
| card.
| nulbyte wrote:
| > Credit card transactions cannot check for name or
| billing a part from the zip code.
|
| This is not true. Name and address verification is
| common.
|
| https://corporate.visa.com/en/solutions/acceptance/verifi
| cat...
| lmm wrote:
| They get compared yes, and it feeds into the fraud
| likelihood score that the merchant gets sent. And then
| usually chooses to ignore, because they make more from
| going ahead with the transaction than from stopping because
| it's suspicious, but it makes it easier for the credit card
| industry to put the liability on them.
| NaomiLehman wrote:
| Well, for example, I can set Stripe Radar to hard match the
| name on the CC, for example. Very granular control is
| possible, but doing stuff like checking zip codes, names
| leads to false negatives and isn't worth it, in my
| experience.
| therein wrote:
| Just keep in mind, if you give your device to the Apple Store
| for repairs, they'll automatically expect the person who is
| picking up to have a matching ID to the Apple account.
|
| It was a fun misunderstanding to resolve when I went to pick
| up my repaired Macbook Pro and they expected my ID to say
| Mark Suckerberg. It was resolved relatively uneventfully but
| still had to get the manager over.
| andscoop wrote:
| Another fun side effect, if you put an emoji in your name,
| you'll need to manually edit it every time you use Apple
| pay or it breaks the transaction.
| rsync wrote:
| "... then zip them up, anyone you send that zip to (a
| journalist, a public file-hosting site, w/e) will have your
| full legal name ..."
|
| A bit of a leap to assume that your Apple ID (or the name you
| give your iphone) is your full legal name ... or related to any
| name at all ...
|
| My apple ID is built specifically for _just that phone_ and is
| jettisoned when I upgrade /change the phone. The apple ID is
| not related to my own name.
|
| I don't consider this an aggressive - or even interesting -
| privacy practice.
|
| Did you use your full legal name when you signed up with
| Blizzard for WoW ? Why would you do anything different for
| Apple ?
|
| They are not the IRS. They are not a passport agency. They are
| not the government. Stop treating them that way.
| paranoidrobot wrote:
| If you're someone who's bought into the Apple ecosystem over
| multiple devices, or ave a partner or children who are also
| using devices in the Apple ecosystem, then your Apple ID is
| something that is very definitely tied to you and probably
| difficult to change/give up when you replace your phone.
|
| I don't think it would be at all surprising to find that the
| vast majority of people use their legal name or something
| closely associated with their identity, and that it persists
| over multiple devices.
| niek_pas wrote:
| As defensible as it may be, your behavior is very far from
| the norm. You may not consider this a aggressive privacy
| practice but demographically speaking, it absolutely is.
| jamwil wrote:
| So you repurchase your entire App Store library when you
| upgrade your phone?
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Do other file systems even support the extended attributes from
| Apple?
| kccqzy wrote:
| When you create a ZIP, the extended attributes are saved to
| separate files. When you copy them to a FAT filesystem they
| are also saved to separate files.
| jamescrowley wrote:
| I wonder if this works more reliably than airdropping between my
| iPhone and MacBook... which seems to be 50% success rate at best.
| Retr0id wrote:
| I was _never_ able to make it work, for some reason.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| I'm sure Apple will slap some annoy-a-trons to it any moment
| urbandw311er wrote:
| This sounds great but I can't even get Airdrop to work reliably
| between my Apple devices, let alone Android.
| hollow-moe wrote:
| is it just the proprietary quickshare that no other rom or even
| os can implement ? sure won't care to open to read that shit from
| g**gle and assume it is.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| Why is quick share buried in the settings menu, instead of being
| an app?
|
| Especially when receiving a file, it makes no sense to start by
| going into settings.
| abraham wrote:
| Generally, you don't have to open settings. The the built-in
| share menu from a file has quick share as an option and if
| someone shares something with you, you'd get a notification.
| gumby271 wrote:
| You can add it to the quick settings tiles in the notification
| shade, they show that exact flow in the blog post.
| codethief wrote:
| Do we know yet whether this will require Google Play Services and
| the like on Android? Or, worse, SafetyNet? I dream of using this
| on GrapheneOS without any Google stuff.
| Narushia wrote:
| I'd be surprised if it did, there's no technical reason to
| require those. Also, SafetyNet is deprecated in favor of Play
| Integrity, so you're not likely to see the former in any new
| apps/services.
| codethief wrote:
| > I'd be surprised if it did, there's no technical reason to
| require those.
|
| That has never stopped Google from requiring Play Services.
| benwaffle wrote:
| QuickShare already requires Google Play Services, so I don't
| think that will change
| supportengineer wrote:
| Does anyone remember the old YouSendIt? That was a really easy
| way to share files with anyone. You uploaded a file to their
| site, and you should share a secret link.
| ls612 wrote:
| That's more or less how iMessage works when you send a file. It
| encrypts the file on your device, uploads it to iCloud, and
| then sends a link and the decryption key as an iMessage (so
| it's E2EE) to the recipient.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Is iPhone still abstracting files away into some kind of seamless
| data experience for the end user or does is finally understand
| what files are for?
| Antrikshy wrote:
| They have a shiny file system abstraction, but ever since they
| introduced that, they have allowed downloading arbitrary files
| into it AFAIK.
| benwaffle wrote:
| There's a files app
| dataflow wrote:
| What I want to know is under what circumstances Quick Share will
| send the files over the internet, and how exactly I can prevent
| that and force it to go solely over the local network. Nearby
| Share had the ability to control this, and it seems they
| deliberately removed it from Quick Share.
| varenc wrote:
| AirDrop compatible Quick Share isn't even going over the local
| network. It create an adhoc device-to-device wireless
| connection and the files are sent that way. So the two phones
| don't even need to be on wifi or be on the same network at all.
| The local network isn't involved.
|
| Given this, I think there's minimal risk of it sending files
| over the internet.
| grishka wrote:
| Huh, so assuming this will work with macOS as well, this
| eventually makes NearDrop, my macOS app that goes the other way
| around by implementing Google's Quick Share, obsolete.
| hrtk wrote:
| How did Apple agree to this?
| Dban1 wrote:
| Finally in 2025, a revolutionary advancement in technology.
| oceansky wrote:
| We didn't have the processing power for this before!
|
| AI made some PhD productive enough for this to finally be
| possible.
| jgord wrote:
| One of my many side projects was a thing called ODO .. linux box
| hooked up to the TV, running a web browser provided and intranet
| web page where you can browse media and files tree and thus share
| files.
|
| Could also use it to play media - so a phone or tablet could act
| as a remote control from anywhere in wifi reach, and play music
| on the main TV screen / speakers or on the local device.
|
| Was pretty cool, but didnt have the funds to commercialize it.
| SilverElfin wrote:
| I can't believe iPhone interoperability is still so bad. The
| group chats on iMessage have weird effects when you switch to
| android, where your friends will send messages that don't reach
| you because they're still sending it as iMessage to the whole
| group. The iCloud on windows doesn't work and won't sync files
| properly will use up your CPU. The entirety of iTunes is terrible
| and awkward. And of course, the functionality on AirPods is
| crippled outside of their ecosystem. These companies need more
| regulations not less.
| schappim wrote:
| This makes me wonder what concessions Google were able to get out
| of Apple for access to Gemini.
| ETH_start wrote:
| It's odd that I'm far more likely to use standard internet
| protocols to transfer files when I'm within Bluetooth range of
| other phones, when the Bluetooth option works faster and more
| efficiently.
| wackget wrote:
| Incredible! In an astounding feat, it has only taken a mere two
| decades to enable the world's largest tech companies to provide
| the most basic levels of interopability.
|
| At this breakneck speed of technological development, one can
| only imagine what wonderful boons await consumers in the next few
| decades.
| symbogra wrote:
| I feel like we have finally entered the 21st century! Next stop
| moon bases and flying cars!
| YPPH wrote:
| Apple could have implemented this a long time ago but decided
| not to implement Bluetooth file sharing.
| Menu_Overview wrote:
| AirDrop is faster and more secure and reliable than simple
| Bluetooth file sharing. There are a number of reasons they
| weren't going to do that.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| Tons of antitrust cases and people still believe this in
| 2025.
| eviks wrote:
| They're might have exhausted their centennial budget of
| cooperation on trivial things!
| mid-kid wrote:
| The astounding feat of reinventing Bluetooth...
| richwater wrote:
| Airdrop has nothing to do with Bluetooth
| jeroenhd wrote:
| It took the EU forcing Apple's hand. If it were up to Apple,
| you'd still need to buy an iPhone/iPod/iPad/iMac to get access
| to basic file sharing.
| glonq wrote:
| DAE remember in 2010 when Steve Jobs said that Facetime would
| be an open industry standard?
| shadowfiend wrote:
| FaceTime got caught up in patent issues that precluded both
| opening it up and resulted in architecture changes:
| https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/report-after-
| pat... .
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| Indeed. We have flying cars, FSD, AI and borderline AGI,
| robots, yet file sharing is like breakthrough in technologia.
|
| This is why we need more scrutiny against big tech. Interop and
| platform openess.
| figassis wrote:
| Did you guys notice the number of steps that need to happen to
| share something as simple as a photo?
| eimrine wrote:
| Just one extra step: upload all your files to our servers.
| Trust us, this is for your security.
| SXX wrote:
| And Pixel phones still not support Miracast because Google want
| to push their own proprietary tech.
| kleiba wrote:
| It's amazing how seemingly trivial things turn out to be really
| hard to be in practice. Like:
|
| - sharing files between two phones
|
| - printing a page on that printer over there
|
| - getting the projector to display my screen (correctly, or at
| all)
|
| - getting my wife not to click on a link in a random email
| lloeki wrote:
| > getting my wife not to click on a link in a random email
|
| Hot take: MUAs should simply not make links clickable/copyable
| on render, or even strip any URI away completely.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Just tell your MUA to only display the plaintext version. You
| should do that anyways.
| lloeki wrote:
| I mean that to protect the proverbial technology-challenged
| grandma it should be the default.
|
| And that it should even s,http://.*,,g them out.
| lexicality wrote:
| - sharing files between two phones when Apple's monopolistic
| tendencies are involved
|
| I've been using Quick Share to send files between different
| makes of Android phone for ages. This is entirely on Apple.
| cenamus wrote:
| I wish that would work when you don't have internet.
|
| Had to fall back to old school bluetooth, and like 1 MB/s to
| share a video with a friend.
| rahkiin wrote:
| I've been using AirDrop to send files between different mames
| of iOS phone and tablet for ages.
| shaky-carrousel wrote:
| The fact that you are impressed that different products
| from the same brand are interoperable between them says
| volumes about Apple and Apple users.
| tredre3 wrote:
| Android didn't have a way to share files between them for
| the longest time. Initially there was Beam but it never
| worked. The first semi-reliable way to exchange files
| between two android phones, without using a third party
| utility, was Nearby Share dates from 2020.
|
| So yeah, it's a low bar, but one that only Apple bothered
| to clear from the get go apparently.
| jesterson wrote:
| > It's amazing how seemingly trivial things turn out to be
| really hard to be in practice
|
| There is nothing "amazing" there, just big tech trying to lock
| you up in their ecosystem and make your use of "other" devices
| as difficult as it can be.
|
| And of course deny it along the way.
| Lutzb wrote:
| I am still think that transfering state between devices is the
| next big thing(tm) waiting to happen. I am working on a file on
| my macbook, now I want to seamslessly move the whole
| application working on it to my nearby Windows machine and just
| continue. Seems impossible right now.
| jamwil wrote:
| Apple has been iterating on Handover and Continuity for many
| years and it's still not perfect (maybe it's better on a
| newer stable of devices, I couldn't say). But it's clearly
| challenging even within a tightly coordinated ecosystem; I
| suspect crossing the platform divide reliably would be
| extremely hard.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| Seems like that would be pretty huge.
| lukeschlather wrote:
| Even expecting state on a single device to remain is a pretty
| tall order. Something randomly happens at least once a week
| which forces me to close all my browser tabs, either the OS
| or the browser restarts. Often while I'm working.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Though I think it is important to point out, that the reasons
| are very different ones. It is not due to some technological
| difficulties. It is more. about ruthless companies throwing
| logs between our legs in some cases, then just lack of skill
| and quality in some cases, and people not being very high on
| the computer literacy scale.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| For the first 3, that's mostly because technology has stopped
| being a productivity tool and became an ad delivery vehicle
| with some vestigial (and deteriorating) productivity features.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| Except Apple is the one making file sharing hard between non-
| Apple devices and they aren't making most of their money on
| ads
| sd9 wrote:
| I don't understand why printing is still so difficult in 2025
| thiht wrote:
| It's not if you pay the price. I have a Brother printer
| (inkjet) and it literally just works. I can go months without
| printing anything, then I just print a document from my phone
| or laptop and it just works.
|
| This is something that should be normal but I'm still amazed
| every time I use it because I had an Epson before and the
| experience was... not the same.
| mystifyingpoi wrote:
| +1 for Brother. Works flawlessly without any drivers. The
| only pain point is the setup - I have the cheapo laser one
| without any screen, and AFAIK you need Windows software for
| the initial WiFi setup. After this, it's not needed
| anymore.
| sd9 wrote:
| Yeah, my Brother printer just works too. No other brands
| seem to.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Printer manufacturers make it difficult. There are standard
| printing protocols but printer manufacturers will disable
| those until you've installed their ad-filled, subscription-
| filled app. If it weren't for the industrial sabotage, just
| plugging a USB printer into a computer or clicking "add
| printer" from a network browser would just work out of the
| box.
|
| Mopria pretty much universally fixes printing on all
| competent printers by smoothing over the rough edges of IPP.
| weberer wrote:
| If you're on a Linux or Mac computer which uses CUPS, its
| pretty easy.
| thunfischtoast wrote:
| Now fix Direct Share on android, which is a highly broken feature
| and has been for years.
| leshenka wrote:
| Why, I think you'd be able to send files between two androids
| via airdrop implementation.
| profsummergig wrote:
| Why is it still so dodgy to share my clipboard between my cheap
| brand (i.e. non-Pixel) 4-year old Android phone and my Windows 11
| PC? It's a failure on both Google's and Microsoft's part.
| itsCarton wrote:
| KDE Connect handles that and a ton more very seamlessly imo.
| Not sure if the solution has to be first-party to qualify as
| "non-dodgy" but for a third-party solution it's pretty damned
| good
| coderedart wrote:
| Throwing in my support for kde connect. It's just super
| convenient and it's FOSS + cross platform too. kde should
| honestly advertise it aggressively. There's nothing like it
| anywhere else.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Because functional clipboard sharing would make you more
| productive and so you'll generate less "engagement" and screen
| time. Neither of those companies benefits.
| anshumankmr wrote:
| Can you airdrop it to me peeps in shambles...
| teekert wrote:
| Well that's nice but given my still extremely poor experiences
| with Airdrop between 2 iPhones, I remain somewhat skeptical.
| ssenssei wrote:
| I use this app called LocalSend between my Mac, my phone, and my
| Windows. It's genuinely a godsend, and I hope whoever reads it
| tries it
| aallaall wrote:
| Only took 18 years for apple and google, good work! See you in
| 2043 for next common feature.
| bmacho wrote:
| ~a month ago I saw a comment on HN someone stating that the only
| possible way to send data from computer to phone is to convert it
| to base64, open it in a text file (several pages), photo them,
| OCR them and convert them back on the phone.
|
| The comment got deleted shortly after, but I like the idea of
| someone actually trying to send data from computer to phone,
| failing, and settling on this method
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| I'd use QR codes rather than OCR.
| deknos wrote:
| can please someone build a iphone+ android app which does
| conveniently what cimbar (cimbar.org) does? than we do need much
| less of those filesharing activities, because videos go up to a
| few mb, and bigger than that.. well you can encrypt, share key
| via such an app and then upload to whereever.
| isolli wrote:
| Only tangentially related, but I was greatly disappointed when I
| learned that iPhones cannot read contact information from an NFC
| chip. I help my son program the chip, and then we realized that a
| significant fraction of the population would not be able to read
| it.
| linsomniac wrote:
| Has anyone gotten this to work? I tried with my Pixel 10 and my
| wife's iPhone 14, and her phone said something like "You can't do
| this with Android phones".
| jeroenhd wrote:
| The iPhone needs iOS 26 and the Pixel needs the software
| updates Google started rolling out yesterday. You may need to
| update everything/wait for the magical A/B testing algorithm to
| permit you to update.
| mavhc wrote:
| It's 2025 and finally got back to Bluetooth file sharing OBEX
| that was supported in Android 2 in 2009, and the Palm 3 in 1998
| (using IR), as long as you buy another new phone
| esbranson wrote:
| As mentioned by others, this apparently uses Wi-Fi Aware (aka
| Neighbor Awareness Networking or NAN). I'd be interested to know
| if the wpa_supplicant NAN interfaces can be used.[1]
|
| [1] https://w1.fi/cgit/hostap/tree/wpa_supplicant/README-NAN-USD
| bob1029 wrote:
| Now do Universal Clipboard:
|
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/102430
|
| You don't realize how much you needed this until you use it a few
| times.
| thayne wrote:
| Why is it "starting with Pixel 10" and not "starting with Android
| X"? Will this only be available on new Pixel devices?
| podgorniy wrote:
| 2025
|
| --
|
| Read with sarcasm
| kccqzy wrote:
| AirDrop sometimes just doesn't work and gives you zero tools to
| debug why. In my experience airdrop between phones seem to work
| fine (probably helped by UWB), but involving Macs makes it an
| unreliable mess. Staring at the "there is no one nearby to share
| with" screen with little you can do. Bonus points when it's
| asymmetrical: the Mac finds the iPhone just fine but the iPhone
| cannot find the Mac. When the device is finally found, tapping on
| it does not cause the other device to present any UI whatsoever
| to accept the transfer, and the sending devices simply displays
| "Declined" after a timeout. And if your Mac has multiple user
| accounts (traditional UNIX-style security boundary) it is
| undefined which user account will receive the notification to
| accept the transfer.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| I haven't had AirDrop fail on me, but I have had other similar
| issues with Apple's "ecosystem" integration.
|
| And that's the frustrating part of using Apple. When it works,
| it works great. When it doesn't work, you have zero visibility
| into what's happening or what went wrong, and no tools to
| debug. It's just a magic black box and you are SOL.
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| Can anyone else implement this, or is it only a google play
| services thing?
|
| I don't like how android's local share system seems to need to be
| tied to a google account to work, and from some limited research
| earlier it won't work without play services installed.
| issafram wrote:
| I've for a Pixel 8 Pro, with the latest Android version. I hope
| they enable this in the future. No reason for it to be only for
| the 10+
| estimator7292 wrote:
| But how else will they convince you to buy a new phone?
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| As with all things Google, they still don't know that they both
| owned and killed a similar technology (Bump) 11 years ago.
|
| https://blog.bu.mp/post/61411611006/bump-google
|
| https://blog.bu.mp/
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bump_(application)
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