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.
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.
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.
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.
Is the Android equivalent any better?
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.
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.
Especially when receiving a file, it makes no sense to start by going into settings.
If you're not close, telegram fork allow easy sharing of files too.
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.
3 decades later, hooray, now we can share files between Android and iPhone!
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.
I can also recommend LocalSend.
Given this, I think there's minimal risk of it sending files over the internet.
Isn't that just Wi-Fi Direct? Which I understand establishes a separate, dedicated temporary network for that task over Wi-Fi, with the two devices being the only ones connected to it? Isn't that still two machines on the same network via Wi-Fi, merely separate from prior networks they may have been connected to? How can you claim there is no local network or that the device doesn't need to be on Wi-Fi at all? Surely they need both a local network and Wi-Fi? Or are you referring to Bluetooth-only transfers?
In any case, my point obviously wasn't that I my home router has to see the packets, but whether/when servers on the internet become involved...
https://support.apple.com/en-us/102430
You don't realize how much you needed this until you use it a few times.
Unfortunately, due to privacy restrictions on modern versions of both iOS and Android, updating the shared clipboard with things copied from the phone has to be done manually....
--
Read with sarcasm
...still relevant
/s
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.
The almost universal solution is "should have gotten Apple."
They naturally choose to transfer stuff from the same app that they are using to communicate with others.
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.
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.
Just needs a WebRTC capable browser.
And Apple devices can do this while simultaneously connected to another wifi network. Maybe Android does too. Which would make your concern more possible if it does this too!
https://www.ditto.com/blog/cross-platform-p2p-wi-fi-how-the-...
Some background: https://www.ditto.com/blog/cross-platform-p2p-wi-fi-how-the-...
On the Apple side, this was prompted by the EU Digital Markets Act: https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/questions-and-answe...
That might also explain the limited Pixel 10 rollout, if it required a specific WiFi chipset/firmware.
[1] https://www.netspi.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/google-fea...
> Close-range wireless file transfers: this feature allows to access the same iOS-controlled features as Apple’s services in third-party file sharing apps, creating, for example, alternatives to AirDrop.
As you can read here (https://www.ditto.com/blog/cross-platform-p2p-wi-fi-how-the-...):
> Under pressure from the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), Apple is being forced to ditch its proprietary peer-to-peer Wi-Fi protocol – Apple Wireless Direct Link (AWDL) – in favor of the industry-standard Wi-Fi Aware, also known as Neighbor Awareness Networking (NAN). A quietly published EU interoperability roadmap mandates Apple support Wi-Fi Aware 4.0 in iOS 19 and v5.0,1 thereafter, essentially forcing AWDL into retirement. This post investigates how we got here (from Wi-Fi Direct to AWDL to Wi-Fi Aware), what makes Wi-Fi Aware technically superior, and why this shift unlocks true cross-platform peer-to-peer connectivity for developers.
https://darker.ink/writings/Mobile-design-with-device-to-dev...
It has a lot of potential but unfortunately it has been kept back until now by lack of support and interoperability.
Google acquired it and immediately killed it.
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.
Sounds like a Nikon mirrorless. I have a Z6iii, and I am constantly confused with the networking setup. There are something like three duplicated menus, all with very similar functionality.
- 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...
>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.
At this breakneck speed of technological development, one can only imagine what wonderful boons await consumers in the next few decades.
This is why we need more scrutiny against big tech. Interop and platform openess.
So what's better than this?
- 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
We used to be able to send files over Bluetooth before the iPhone came out.
AI made some PhD productive enough for this to finally be possible.
That has never stopped Google from requiring Play Services.
I am really ashamed by how wrong I was and how WE allowed things to became so artificially limited.
This is intentional.
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.
Expensive, overly complex, and stupidly slow.
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
[1] https://w1.fi/cgit/hostap/tree/wpa_supplicant/README-NAN-USD
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.
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.
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.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.
I thought it was going to be slow, but hundreds of gigabytes was fully transferred in less than a minute.
Another easy example of use case is wanting to share a file during a flight or while being overseas on a boat.
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.
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.
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.
I've been using Quick Share to send files between different makes of Android phone for ages. This is entirely on Apple.
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.
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.
Mopria pretty much universally fixes printing on all competent printers by smoothing over the rough edges of IPP.
Hot take: MUAs should simply not make links clickable/copyable on render, or even strip any URI away completely.
Then I assume they'll roll it out further
For better or worse, I do own Pixel 10
https://security.googleblog.com/2025/11/android-quick-share-...
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
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.
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.
Apple likes to have far more control than that.
Now "bluetooth" I could buy (and I do not miss at all).
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.)
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.
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...
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.
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.
kind of worked with flip-phone resolutions, but tiresome with multi-megabyte pictures of today
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.
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
I doubt this was done for the DMA.
> 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.
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.
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-...
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.
The old days of being able to AirDrop something to everyone on a plane because it was set to "everyone" by default are over.
Please stop excusing this anti social behaviour.
That's why I never got around to using it. Hoping it's changed. If Syncthing can share across networks, why not something else?
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.
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.
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.
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
yeah right
And that it should even s,http://.*,,g them out.
Yes, I agree.
> And that it should even s,http://.*,,g them out.
No. Links are very useful and constantly present in conversation and manually written into messages. Do you seriously propose to basically ban them by default? Also I don't want the MUA to censor messages, that would also lead to a lot of confusion.
If anything, they could not render them as hyperlinks by default, but stripping them out, no.
Depending on whether the respective kernel supported it, you were still unofficially able to switch removable SD cards into mass storage mode (though only with a rooted phone), although somehow, even if I remembered to officially unmount the SD card from Android first, it somehow still often led to mild filesystem corruption (luckily never anything fatal, though) that required regular chkdsk-usage.
> 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.
My current phone no longer supports the above mass storage mode-hack for the removable SD card, which annoyed me enough that I actually wrote my own SMB server app (https://github.com/buttercookie42/SimbaDroid), because all other SMB servers for Android that I'm aware of were either outright broken, unsupported, buggy or fiddly to use. Sadly the only open source Java-based SMB server only supports SMBv1, so you're stuck with that, and you still need root for full comfort, but within those limitations it works quite nicely.
https://www.ditto.com/blog/cross-platform-p2p-wi-fi-how-the-...
In theory Apple could've maintained both, but that seems like a waste of development time to me.
I doubt they would've had to implement any specific protocol if they had just opened up AWDL, but I suppose they'd rather keep that closed to maintain the ability to guard their walled garden in non-EU devices.
They need Airdrop to work with phones who haven’t upgraded, so doesn’t feel like a waste to me. And they already have working AWDL code, so it’s just maintenance, probably not a ton of work.
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.
So yeah, it's a low bar, but one that only Apple bothered to clear from the get go apparently.
This is the "smoking gun" section:
5.4.8. Implementation timing
(245) Apple should provide effective interoperability with the P2P Wi-Fi connection
feature by implementing the measures for Wi-Fi Aware 4.0 in the next major iOS
release, i.e. iOS 19, at the latest, and for Wi-Fi Aware 5.0 in the next iOS release at
the latest nine months following the introduction of the Wi-Fi Aware 5.0
specification.
It is possible, I suppose, that Apple intended all along to release this feature with iOS 26. You'd have to be an Apple insider to know for sure. But the simpler explanation is that they did it because the EU told them to.
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 ...
In Linux iw and the new cfg80211 NAN module has support for some hardware. There are few chips in desktop/laptop ecosystem that have the feature, but it is hard to know which ones today, it is more common not to have support than to.
AFAIK no major distros include UI based support that regular users can use. Most Chromebooks do not have the hardware to support, ChromeOS[2] did not have support OOB, so even Google does not implement it for all their devices in the first place.
For Apple to implement is easier than Microsoft or Google given their vertical control, but not simple even if they wanted to. They may still need a hardware update/change and they typically rollout few versions of the hardware first before they announce support so most people have access to it, given the hardware refresh cycle it is important for basic user experience which is why people buy Apple. What is the point if you cannot share with most users because they don't have latest hardware? Average user will try couple of times and never use it again because it doesn't "work".
Sometimes competing standards / lack of compliance are political play for control of the standards not about vendor lock-in directly. Developers are the usual casualties in these wars, rather than end users directly. Webdevs been learning that since JScript in the mid 90s.
All this to say, as evidences go this is weak for selective compliance due to regulatory pressure.
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/2284386/...
[2] I haven't checked recently
One of my first jobs was in infosec, and there was a sign above one of the senior consultant's door quoting Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". That quote is right.
There's so much going on at any medium-to-large organisation, from engineering to politics and personalities. All that multiplied across hundreds of thousands of people in thousands of teams. Its possible you're right. Apple might have provided an iOS-only SDK for wifi aware because of regulatory pressure. Its also possible they want to provide it on all platforms, but just started with an ios only version because of who works on it, or which business unit they're part of, or politics, or because they think its more useful on ios than on macos. We just don't know.
Whenever I've worked in large organisations, I'm always amazed how much nonsense goes on internally that is impossible to predict from the outside. Like, someone emails us about something important. It makes the rounds internally, but the person never gets emailed back. Why? Maybe because nobody inside the company thought it was their job to get back to them. Or Steve should really have replied, but he was away on paternity leave or something and forgot about it when he got back to work. Or sally is just bad at writing emails. Or there's some policy that PR needs to read all emails to the public, and nobody could be bothered. And so on. From the outside you just can't know.
I don't know if you're right or wrong. Apple isn't all good or all bad. And the probability isn't 100% and its not 0%. Take off the tin foil hat and have some uncertainty.
Unless you have insider knowledge, we don't know anything for sure here. Apple isn't a person. Apple doesn't have a single, consistent opinion when it comes to openness and EU regulation. (And even a person can change their mind.) All we know is that some teams at apple responded in the past to some EU regulation with malicious compliance. That doesn't tell us for sure what apple will do here.
Apple is 165 000 people. That's a lot of people. A lot more people than comment regularly on HN, and look at us! We don't agree about anything. I'm sure plenty of apple's employees hate EU regulation. And plenty more would love to opensource everything apple does.
That sort of inconsistency is exactly what we see across apple's product line. The Swift programming language is opensource. But SwiftUI is closed source. Webkit and FoundationDB are opensource. But almost everything on iOS is closed source. Apple sometimes promotes open standards - like pushing Firewire, USB and more recently USB-C - which they helped to design. But they also push plenty of proprietary standards that they keep under lock and key. Like the old 20-pin ipod connector, that companies had to pay money to apple to be allowed to use in 3rd party products. Or Airdrop. Or iMessage. AFS (apple filesystem) is closed source. But its also incredibly well documented. My guess is the engineers responsible want to support 3rd party implementations of AFS but for some reason they're prohibited from open-sourcing their own implementation.
We don't know anything for sure here. For my money, there's even odds in a year or two this API quietly becomes available on macos, watchos and tvos as well. If you "know for sure" that won't happen, lets make a bet at 100-1 odds. If you're sure, its free money for you.
Nor send text message with images.
> 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.
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.
https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/questions-and-answe...
Apple has to allow alternate solutions on the iPhone - not that they have to allow AirDrop interoperability.
I promise you you will find what you're looking for right there.
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.
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.
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?
It’s still a classic Apple “the open standard sucks so build a proprietary one that’s great but only on iPhone”
Bluetooth was a huge upgrade because you no longer needed to do that.
5.7.8. Implementation timing
(402) Apple should implement the measures required to enable the scenario of close-range
wireless file transfers while the receiving device has the relevant close-range wireless
file transfer solution open by 1 June 2026. Apple should implement all measures for
the features for close-range wireless file transfer solutions in the release of iOS 20,
and in any case by the end of 2026.
Given Apple's usual release timelines, June 2026 is a bit early for iOS 27 (what the ruling calls iOS 20). In between that, the fact that this is a pretty big piece of feature work, and the fact that they were forced to ship other parts by iOS 26, I find it likelier that Apple shipped this in iOS 26, rather than shipping it some time next year as a point release.
Also, you have to consider the timing. Google is shipping this functionality now, a couple of months after the iOS 26 release. It would be just plain weird for Google to ship a reverse-engineered implementation of Apple's old proprietary stack after Apple has definitely already shipped part of the new, interoperable stack.
I'm with you on the system requirements bloat. Really sad honestly. That said, I don't think the engine is more 3D than it used to be, is it? I believe it's still isometric 2D with 3D physics. Could definitely (definitively?) be wrong though.
Here's some discussion on it: https://www.reddit.com/r/ageofempires/comments/16aowwc/are_t...
To me it looks kinda 3D, when you pane left right and look at buildings, but I could be wrong and that could be merely some effect, that also takes some on the fly calculation.
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.
This is not true. Name and address verification is common.
https://corporate.visa.com/en/solutions/acceptance/verificat...
As soon as I learned what BANK NAME is acceptable name I used it almost everywhere.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
* 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-...
Edit:
Here is the procedure I was talking about and all prerequisites for it to work:
* 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.
Weird man, weird.
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.
If you through your phone in the ocean and gestured on another one, would your new phone look just like your old one?
And it’s been discontinued for Android….
https://forum.syncthing.net/t/discontinuing-syncthing-androi...
If I can’t in fact throw my phone in the ocean when I’m away from my computer, go buy another phone, log in and everything is automatically restored, it’s a poor solution
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.
There was almost a whole decade there where Apple pretended that the feature just didn't need to exist.
Apple added copy/paste in iOS 3.0 in 2009
It was around that time it (Files app) got a major refresh.
Also, on Android, you can choose any file explorer. You're stuck with Files and it sucks (but it looks nice).
Never have been different. What did your relatives doing?
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
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.
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
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.
"The file disappeared. I can't find it."
"Look in the download folder."
"How do I get to that?"
Since it's relying on your internet connection, skeptical it'd be faster than AirDrop for a large amount of data like photos. But for swapping contacts I bet it was faster since it didn't have to spend time establishing a new direct connection.
By faster I mean the initial connection, it was instant despite the server-based pairing, which made it feel even more magical. With AirDrop you sometimes experience quite a bit of signal hunting.
A comparable experience would be when you touch phones to share a contact with NFC, it was in that ballpark of responsiveness.
Edit: want to emphasize that it was totally ubiquitous. Every phone has it
japanese phones were buggy, feature packed monstrosities. a bunch of companies fighting to check as many boxes as they could. it's not a surprise that they got wiped out by an attempt to make a holistic internet communicator.
but for a while, there was nothing like them and their ability to get information on the internet
In 1993.
Someone even ported it to an emulator! https://shonumi.github.io/articles/art11.html
A few weeks later, the CTO looked at my work and asked why it was missing xyz features from his legacy project, saying that if I'm gonna take a project and rewrite it, it better be at least as good as the old project.
It was a pretty good lesson for me to get early in my career, and I've carried it with me ever since. Don't break or rewrite that which already works.
It's evident that no one at Google ever got that lesson.
NB: I know Google definitely has other reasons for acquiring and killing off Bump — they were probably building a competing technology that was shitty and bump was doing it better and sooner than them so better to buy and kill than to make their own product better. But I think my the lesson from my anecdote still stands from a purely product point of view, and I feel like it should make business sense but apparently you can make bad micro business decisions as long as you can convince shareholders they were good macro business decisions.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
PS: I just realized this article is older than some of the people here.
Thanks for sharing, it's always great to learn from folks who have been through it for literal decades.
(Ideally these things are written while the code is being written but let's be honest, we rarely keep those up to date)
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.
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
The connection can be very fast. In this example, a 280 MB file is transferred in less than 10 seconds:
The only app I have ever truly thought “this is the future”
You said there's nothing wrong with how Apple exploits their target market.
Scummy behavior being normalized is what's wrong with it.
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.
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?
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.
----
> 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/ch03s08.htm...
> There was almost a whole decade there where Apple pretended that the feature just didn't need to exist.
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)"
Android is possibility/ (overdose of) options Apple is polished (and late).
Different strokes for different folks
The correct way for what I intend would be /var/lib/user/<uid>/, but yes this does not exist on my host. But I honestly don't see why non-ephemeral per user data shouldn't be put into /home. It is definitely user-specific, under the control of the user, instead of the OS, and when you want to move your user to another host (or sync it), you definitely want to include that data as well, so putting it across the OS filesystem sounds kind of dirty to me.
> But I honestly don't see why non-ephemeral per user data shouldn't be put into /home
I think I agree— as long as the conventions are clear, I think it's reasonable to have some hidden dirs under $HOME set aside for configuration and cache and so on.
Maybe there's value in exposing a single directory as the root of a sandbox for user files, so users have to go farther out of their way to screw things up, especially depending on your audience. Maybe a decade from now Linux desktops will have something like this, because most apps will run sandboxed in Flatpak, unable to write to the root of $HOME. (Idrk how that's organized, though— maybe apps are just allowed to edit "their" dotfiles without modifying their location.)
But I'm not sure that obscuring configuration data's place in the filesystem in that way is really desirable or necessary. I doubt most users inspect or think about hidden directories on Unix-likes unless they're looking for them anyway.
I think on most desktop distros users only have writing access to their home directory and maybe /tmp.
There ideally should be some separation between your actual documents and system utility stuff. I guess this has mostly happen already with real files sitting in cloud storage. With local storage just being replacable.
All the more reason to put this stuff into the user directory, so that it is automatically included in backups and syncs done by the unaware user.
> The current /home has so much absolute junk that it's easy to not know where your stuff is.
Not my experience. Application data of application XYZ is either in ~/.xyz or in ~/.{config,local,cache}/xyz, depending on whether the application is FHS compliant or not.
goes in ~/Documents
> photos
go in ~/Pictures
> downloads
go in ~/Downloads
> Not auto generated configs.
No Linux applications ever put configuration data in any of the aforementioned locations...
> it's easy to not know where your stuff is.
?????