I can't tell if I'm just too old and infirmed to understand the information needs of the younger generations. But between nearby share, wifi direct, and bluetooth transfer... I have no idea what function I am missing out on. What does airdrop do that makes life so tedious in the absence of?
this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2024
213 points (99.5% liked)
Apple
637 readers
183 users here now
There are a couple of community rules in addition to the main instance rules.
All posts must be about Apple
Anything goes as long as it’s about Apple. News about other companies and devices is allowed if it directly relates to Apple.
No NSFW content
While lemmy.zip allows NSFW content this community is intended to be a place for all to feel welcome. Any NSFW content will be removed and the user banned.
If you have any comments or suggestions please message one of the moderators.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
All of those never work with all of the devices you want to share with or to. And some of them are really cumbersome to set up. Airplay especially makes it really easy to stream content to a larger screen, and most Android solutions are either also proprietary or are not supported by a large enough spectrum of devices.
Airdrop is a little bit less friction than all of the other technologies you mention, but the real problem is that Apple has declined to implement any of the technologies you mentioned, and decided to only support Airdrop for transferring files between devices.
So it you want to transfer a file from iPhone to iPhone, than Airdrop is easy and frictionless.
If you want to transfer a file from Android to Android, then you have all the options you mention and many more to choose from.
But if you want to transfer a file from iPhone to Android (or Android to iPhone), then there basically isn't any options. Airdrop doesn't work on Android because Apple doesn't allow it. And all the options you mentioned doesn't work be cause Apple has refused to implement them.
if you want to transfer a file from iPhone to Android (or Android to iPhone), then there basically isn't any options.
Back before I got my iPhone I remember transferring files from my Android to and from my iPad and MacBook. This was back in 2019 so I cannot recall exactly how it was done, but it was some Bluetooth thing I did.
LocalSend works on them all, its open source and is completely frictionless.
You are correct, and I use it myself, right up until you aren't on the same local network...
I actually haven't tested whether it works if you make a mobile hotspot... But being out in a bar that doesn't offer WiFi, would then require you to first set up a mobile hotspot, get the other person to connect, then download localsend before you can actually transfer the file. And even if the bar offered WiFi, you would kinda hope that the bar has enabled client isolation on the network to avoid spreading malware... But that would in turn defeat Localsend.
With Airdrop you don't need any of that, given that both people have iDevices
LocalSend is so good 👌
I suppose I don't understand what you mean when you say "friction". I'm assuming you mean some sort of difficulty or complexity that makes the process less straightforward than "pressing button make airdrop go brrrr" - in which case I would say is entirely consistent with the ecosystem apple has made for itself.
I don't own an Apple device, but the few time I have interacted with Airdrop it has basically been:
- Press button to share something with Airdrop
- Select the device to send to
- target device receives notification to accept.
- Press accept
- Done
And this has just worked regardless of which combination of Apple devices I had available at the time.
In the ideal case this is just as simple for Androids. But I have tried many different combinations of the technologies that was mentioned above and different types of devices, different brands. And sometimes it just works. But way too often I see a failure for the devices to discover eachother, or once discovered the file failed to transfer, with no obvious explanation of why.
Lol, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ . I've used rooted custom ROM devices since cyanogen mod says and have never had an issue. Weird ones too. Obscure global phones only sold in india or s america. Some work better than others. But I've never had issues with proximity file transfers. Wifi direct is my favorite, but some locked devices restrict this. In those cases BT worked fine (albeit slower).
That would be very frustrating if that were also my experience though. I suppose I can understand a use case for wanting another option. Thanks for the perspective!
Also curious. All I know is that sharing via bluetooth seemed to be strangely absent from IPhones last time I checked. I'd love to be proven wrong, but I swear we couldn't find it. Ended up sharing photos over the PC with a USB cable like in the old days. Interacting with apple users and their walled garden is always an experience...
Yes, it is absent, in favour of the proprietary AirDrop.
Lol, yet again, apple makes its products proprietary to the extent of unusability, but it's the rest of the world that must adopt apple's garbage just so iphone users can actually function... Meanwhile I have to listen to the most entitled braindead morons forever crow about how the rest of the world should just get an iphone so that their iphone will work. I literally don't know a single android user that gives a shit what device other people use. But I have to hear about it weekly from iphone users.
I've just decided that I don't care.
Go EU! Make Apple play fair!
I really don't understand why this isn't the norm. Capitalism is a tool. You wouldn't ask a hammer where to hit but it's totally ok that capitalism is allowed to make its own rules.
Without humans, there is no capitalism. Can we please start to prioritize people and ignore corporate crying. They always cry, it maximizes profit.
Fuck em, use their potential to really help society to create real, sustainable improvements. If everyone follows the same rules, it's not even unfair for them
Capitalism is a tool for capitalists to increase their wealth, that‘s mostly it
Bullshit. Without capitalism we wouldn't have any of the improvements we have today. It's a tool, a system to increase wealth. It just is used wrong, because it is way to influential in areas it shouldn't be able to set the rules.
Think about it, what exactly is wealth? Wealth is good, its just the unfair distribution that's the problem.
Nothing even comes close to capitalism in creating wealth and advancement
If you want to have an honest discussion, don‘t start like that.
As you say, capitalism is a tool to create wealth. But it is not a societal tool. It isn’t a system society introduced in order to increase its wealth. It kinda happened, and in that vain you can‘t say it is just being used the wrong way. It is what it is. Capital (which has accumulated in some hands for some time, for reasons) uses the labor of people who have no such capital in order to increase wealth. You could say that it needs greater control so there’s a little bit more in it for the workers, more than just the bare minimum to survive. But this isn‘t a feature of capitalism, rather a result of workers fighting for some control for a long, long time. The institutions, the state, democracy, primarily serve the interests of the ones who control the production of wealth, not the ones actually creating it. The contradictions property introduces have to be permanently dealt with by the legislative, the judiciary and the executive. Admittedly, the wealth created using this method was gigantic. And yeah, even the workers profited from it (for a long time only in the western world).
But that wasn‘t the goal. The capitalists didn‘t forget this and are at a remarkable campaign to take as much as for themselves again as possible. As in the good old days.
We really have to think for alternatives and don‘t tie our hopes to a system that has exploited us for the past 200 years. Otherwise we are just going in circles.
LocalSend should be a core util of every OS
localsend kinda sucks for sharing files to someone else on a trip or whatever because you need to be on the same network, and on a network that allows device detection. Most public wifi does not.
I figured out a hotspot worked, but it's still miles less convenient than airdrop
oh yah it would be awesome if localsend could toggle a hotspot and generate a quick link for other localsend clients to connect. that would prob require more permissions than apple will ever allow.
Isn’t there already an open standard for this that Apple could simply adopt?
Edit: I could have sworn Matter was talking about including an airdrop-like service but I can’t find a link.
This goes deeper, it's about devs getting access to pretty much any API that Apple only uses internally
This. They’re in a position of power where developers are beholden to what APIs they offer externally, so they can always give their offerings a leg up that no other service can compete with and if you engineer around their imposed limitations, then your app will never make it onto their App Store.
Steve Jobs would just pull the whole fucking thing out of EU.
And lose one of the biggest and wealthy markets on the planet?
Doubt it.
But it would be nice though. If companies can not hold themselves to the law, they shouldn't be part of our society. Some better company that does follow the law will fill in the market in no time.
He'd never have let Android out of the crib in the first place.
But since it is out there - EU can have it. And build their own Pixel to run custom privacy roms and everybody's happy.
But nooooo we have to pass legislation that forces Apple to share their corporate research with fucking Meta so they can do evils with it. Great. What the hell's the point then. All corporate IP is now open source? The pharma companies will dig that.
He probably wouldn't. Even if he hadn't died of sheer pig headed stubbornness.
We'll never know. Due to said stubborness.
Sure.
Short of email or a messaging program nothing exists to be able to transfer files between an iOS and Android based phone. There are some third party utilities that say they can do it bit they’re all janky and well, 3rd party.
Hm… I’m all for open standards, but Apple should retain the right to develop features that work exclusively on their devices (provided their devices support alternative protocols to avoid total lock-in). As open-source and linux loving as I am, I’m a willing prisoner of the Apple closed garden because I appreciate how refined and integrated everything is. (Others’ experience may differ)
The way I read it, they’re not asked to follow an open standard, but to provide a specification for their own standard. That means that they could dictate the pace of development and others could decide for themselves wether or not to implement it for their devices. It’s similar to WhatsApp being forced to provide third parties with API access.
Also, they currently don’t support alternative protocols with cross-platform support and they’re not going to, unless forced.
iPhone does notsupport file sharing over Bluetooth, so it invalidates the condition you put between ().
Huh… Didn’t know. Thanks for pointing it out!
Okay, the EU can have Airdrop.
The experience can still be refined and integrated, without having closed systems for something as simple as sharing a file to another phone. Why would you be against adding more value to your device?
Maintaining backwards compatibility isn’t easy, and cross compatibility just adds more complexity.
The good and the bad of Apple not having the best backwards compatibility is they don’t have to waste time on that. They can do what they do well and make the experience as smooth and seamless as possible. And most importantly move quickly.
I mean just look at windows. Windows 11 has gotten so much shit because they’re trying to change so many things, but they legitimately just can’t. Or on Linux look at its backwards compatibility. That shits a nightmare. Things like flat pack should fix it. But it only fixes it if everything is on flat pack.
Yeah true, so hard to do with their billions of dollars.
All the money in the world won't make everyone else's devs fix (or even just update) their shit.
My guy, it would be a standard that would be implemented in future versions. Maybe they would slowly roll that back to older versions, but it wouldnt matter if they didnt, because tech moves so quickly anyway.
It would be implemented as standard into Android and iOS, not individually by every phone manufacturer.
But bro, a 1000 devs get everything done 10x faster than a 100 devs.
Yeah, I don’t get. Let Apple have their walled garden and people can choose to be in or out. They don’t have a monopoly in any hardware or software market, do they?
If so many people choose their walled garden to make them a monopoly then start forcing them open.
Jesus titty fucking Christ. I don't want to deal with Apple dogshit chattery protocols.
You don't have to, just don't use it.