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...

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.

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.

Shoutout to https://localsend.org/ - it can even open a local webserver if needed.

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

Why only the pixel 10? What piece of hardware is the pixel 9 (one year old) missing?

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.