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.

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.

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.

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.