Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nearby Connections 2.0: offline high bandwidth peer to peer device communication

android-developers.googleblog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 53 posts

Re: Nearby Connections 2.0: offline high bandwidth peer to peer device communication

#11

Post by reaperducer »

mataug wrote: post #3

This is basically Air Drop with extra features and an open API . As @pat2man mentions, It would've been great if Apple and Google made this an open standard instead of having their own proprietary solutions.

It's amazing how much things have changed since AirDrop. In the last two offices in which I've worked (both creative), AirDrop was indispensable. Even in a small team of 20 or so people, it was used hundreds of times a day.

The new Apple era has strayed considerably from "it just works," except for AirDrop, which has been nothing but a pleasure to work with.

Re: Nearby Connections 2.0: offline high bandwidth peer to peer device communication

#13

Post by kennydude »

mataug wrote: post #3

This is basically Air Drop with extra features and an open API . As @pat2man mentions, It would've been great if Apple and Google made this an open standard instead of having their own proprietary solutions.

It sounds more like Nintendo's Streetpass and local multiplayer on the 3DS

Re: Nearby Connections 2.0: offline high bandwidth peer to peer device communication

#14

Post by Animats »

Today we're announcing the availability of this API across all Android devices running Google Play services 11.0 and up.

Of course, Google had to lock up peer to peer communication by tying it to their online store. It's also unencrypted and unauthenticated, so you don't want to use this for home control.

Re: Nearby Connections 2.0: offline high bandwidth peer to peer device communication

#16

Post by nickporter »

Animats wrote: post #14

Today we're announcing the availability of this API across all Android devices running Google Play services 11.0 and up. Of course, Google had to lock up peer to peer communication by tying it to their online store. It's also unencrypted and unauthenticated, so you don't want to use this for home control.

Is it really unencrypted? The blog post says it's encrypted.

Re: Nearby Connections 2.0: offline high bandwidth peer to peer device communication

#17

Post by voltagex_ »

Animats wrote: post #14

Today we're announcing the availability of this API across all Android devices running Google Play services 11.0 and up. Of course, Google had to lock up peer to peer communication by tying it to their online store. It's also unencrypted and unauthenticated, so you don't want to use this for home control.

It used to be that these kinds of protocols would be reversed and reimplemented pretty quickly. See Pidgin (GAIM) and countless other instant messengers. I wonder what's happened - I see a lot less reverse engineering going on these days.

Re: Nearby Connections 2.0: offline high bandwidth peer to peer device communication

#18

Post by tyingq »

nickporter wrote: post #16
Animats wrote: post #14

Today we're announcing the availability of this API across all Android devices running Google Play services 11.0 and up. Of course, Google had to lock up peer to peer communication by tying it to their online store. It's also unencrypted and unauthenticated, so you don't want to use this for home control.

Is it really unencrypted? The blog post says it's encrypted.

It does have at least some concept of auth and encryption, though the auth is optional, and somewhat simplistic: https://developers.google.com/nearby/connections/android/man...

Re: Nearby Connections 2.0: offline high bandwidth peer to peer device communication

#19

Post by Animats »

nickporter wrote: post #16
Animats wrote: post #14

Today we're announcing the availability of this API across all Android devices running Google Play services 11.0 and up. Of course, Google had to lock up peer to peer communication by tying it to their online store. It's also unencrypted and unauthenticated, so you don't want to use this for home control.

Is it really unencrypted? The blog post says it's encrypted.

The API spec says:

"Note: The Nearby Connections API does not require the user to authenticate, which means that it can be used even when the user does not want to sign in or sign-in has failed."

"Warning: Messages sent through the Nearby Connections API are not encrypted. Do not send sensitive data through this API."[1]

[1] https://developers.google.com/games/services/cpp/nearby

Post reply on HN