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Cross-Platform P2P Wi-Fi: How the EU Killed AWDL

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223 points stusmall | 3 comments | 28 Mar 25 13:13 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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mschuster91 ◴[28 Mar 25 14:07 UTC] No.43505607[source]▶
The interesting question is authentication/authorization - at the moment, macOS greatly simplifies this as long as both devices belong to the same Apple ID. On the opposite side, Samsung does the same.

How will that work out?

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lxgr ◴[28 Mar 25 15:30 UTC] No.43506685[source]▶
That's certainly a nice feature, but in comparison to the elephant in the room, i.e. wireless file transfers between Android and iOS being completely impossible at the moment, it's completely insignificant.
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tsujamin ◴[28 Mar 25 16:46 UTC] No.43507488[source]▶
> wireless file transfers between Android and iOS being completely impossible at the moment

P2P proximal wireless transfer, sure, but there's half a dozen apps on your phone that'll let you punt a document, a photo, an invite to someone on the other phone OS platform.

Maybe I'm an edge case, but probably 90% of my Airdrop usage is between my own devices, so the platform taking care of the authentication story is of more utility than cross-platform transfers. If someone isn't on iOS I'll just send them the file on Signal since, if the source is my phone in the first place, it's probably not a huge transfer anyway.

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mschuster91 ◴[28 Mar 25 17:11 UTC] No.43507810[source]▶
> P2P proximal wireless transfer, sure, but there's half a dozen apps on your phone that'll let you punt a document, a photo, an invite to someone on the other phone OS platform.

Yeah, via their server, which means it's slow even if you have wifi, requires valuable data credit if not, or it requires the installation of a companion app on the other device and putting the other device in the same network.

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1. MaKey ◴[28 Mar 25 17:30 UTC] No.43507997[source]▶
The biggest point for me is privacy. I don't want to upload private data to some server just to send it to another device that's next to mine.
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2. apitman ◴[28 Mar 25 23:50 UTC] No.43511148[source]▶
Most quality apps should be e2ee right?
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3. MaKey ◴[29 Mar 25 12:33 UTC] No.43515028[source]▶
Do you have an example for such an app? I don't know anybody using 3rd party file transfer apps. Usually files are uploaded to some cloud service (iCloud, OneDrive, ...) and then shared with a link if they can't be sent via messaging apps like WhatsApp or Signal.