Hacker News Reader

Comment by lxgr | Hacker News Reader

Of course it isn't. The time of interoperable standards in consumer devices is long past.

Bluetooth used to support file transfers from device to device on feature- and early smartphones no matter the brand; now there's AirDrop (and maybe sometimes Google Nearby, but only if the humidity and lunar phase is just right).

In home audio streaming, there was once DLNA; now there's AirPlay and Google Cast.

We have two mutually incompatible walled gardens, and while life within them is admittedly nicer than in a world of poorly-implemented standards, the walls are getting higher by the day.

View on HN

Good call out, it’s incredible we went from local file transfers with Bluetooth to needing an internet connection to transfer to a person sitting next to you just because they have a different OS. If only the EU could pressure the big folks to adopt one wireless transfer protocol like it did USB C recently with Apple.

Oh, my (optimistic, but I think not unrealistic) read of the DMA is that this is the case already!

There are clauses in there that mandate gatekeepers to give access to all kinds of interfaces only accessible to the native OS or first-party apps. I'd expect AWDL/AirDrop to match the type of thing the EU wants Apple to open up quite nicely.

If Google had any interest in shaking the duopoly, they'd of course be first to request Apple to open up AirDrop access to Android.

Realistically we'll hopefully see at least some third-party app vendor that bridges the gap with something that doesn't need an install on both iOS and Android, since in many AirDrop scenarios people don't have time, knowledge, or a network connection to install some unknown third-party app.

Bluetooth file transfer was always nearly useless in my experience, airdrop was somewhat revolutionary in that it actually worked reliably most of the time

For me, reliability has been similar. I will say that it is much faster, though (no wonder – hundreds of Mbit/s over 802.11 vs. 2 Mbit/s over Bluetooth EDR). UX is much better too.

But would it kill them to just support both? I’d take sometimes janky, always slow transfers to Android over having to WhatsApp photos to somebody literally next to me any day.

Maybe not but IIRC iOS at least used to have support for Bluetooth file transfer so it’s annoying only airdrop works now

Are you sure? I don’t think it ever supported that profile (OBEX). macOS did and maybe still does.

AirDrop has its issues too. Used to work in educaiton at a school with 100+ iPads within reception range. Quite common to have A-to-B drops work but not the reverse direction i.e. B-to-A. Solution was often to ask another student C and use their iPad as a proxy i.e. B-to-C-to-A to get something from B to A. Quite fustrating given it would be an issue one day and not the next and what device it appeared on was totally random too. The same device B would send/receive fine to other devices but just not to A, and A itself would send/receive file to others but just not to B! No rhyme or reason to it, and of course being Apple no way to properly debug it.

Apples Bluetooth stack Has had problems for quite a while.

No, it doesn't - and clearly you've never tried to work on Android bluetooth.

This response seems so impulsive and child like. I laughed out loud.

maybe that's why the volume controls on my 1st-gen se no longer apply when using a bt-speaker. granted it's dated hardware on both ends but it used to work fine for 5y+

Bluetooth was always insanely reliable for me for file transfers even on phones and PCs that were a decade apart in manufacturing date. It was slow, but for a lot of things that was fine, and it was the obly way to get data from some really old phones.

I would say bluetooth file transfer has always been reliably slow. So good enough for small files, not for larges.

But much more reliable than pairing and connecting/reconnecting to audio devices for example.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com