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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
