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!
