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The Sorry State of Peer-to-Peer iOS-to-Android connectivity

blog.moritzhaarmann.de

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Re: The Sorry State of Peer-to-Peer iOS-to-Android connectivity

#21

Post by habosa »

zbowling wrote: post #18
habosa wrote: post #5

The popular game app "Spaceteam" does an amazing job of real time p2p communication between iOS and Android devices. It would be great if the developer could release some sort of open-source library for those connections so other people could build on his/her work.

Hey! That was our doing. :-) Apportable (Winter 2011) worked to bring Spaceteam over to Android and we had to face this problem head on. Bluetooth LE does work for Android iOS but it requires a really new Android device with the right hardware, otherwise the safest option is Wifi. A lot of code involved. We open sourced the code we wrote to run on the Android side: https://github.com/apportable/Bluetooth

Thanks for the reply, and great work! This is why I love Hacker News.

Re: The Sorry State of Peer-to-Peer iOS-to-Android connectivity

#22

Post by uuid_to_string »

uuid_to_string wrote: post #12
fidotron wrote: post #6

This is the main area where I suspect Google's greater reliance on clouds leads them to castrate their operating systems. Last time I checked Chrome OS still didn't even support Bonjour mDNS. (Still the case, and it's related to this first mentioned in 2009: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=13573 ) The Android stuff alone is an inconsistent trainwreck (because not all hardware supports all options…

Last time I checked iOS still lacks a TAP device. Castration indeed.

I'm guessing the downvoters have no clue what TAP is or why it is relevant to peer-to-peer.

Either that or they just think this is some critique of their beloved Apple.

I'm referring to the TUN/TAP driver.

All BSD's have it (/dev/tap).

And to easily do encapsulation, which is very handy for VPNs and peer-to-peer, you need it.

OSX has it. iOS does not.

So, downvoters, why is TAP missing from iOS?

Why is iOS crippled? Or "castrated" to use the parent's terminology.

I've got peer-to-peer that relies on TAP. Not a problem with any BSD or Linux or even OSX.

The exception is iOS. Why?

Re: The Sorry State of Peer-to-Peer iOS-to-Android connectivity

#23

Post by rquirk »

thrownaway2424 wrote: post #19
fidotron wrote: post #6

This is the main area where I suspect Google's greater reliance on clouds leads them to castrate their operating systems. Last time I checked Chrome OS still didn't even support Bonjour mDNS. (Still the case, and it's related to this first mentioned in 2009: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=13573 ) The Android stuff alone is an inconsistent trainwreck (because not all hardware supports all options…

My Android immediately becomes the remote control of my Sonos system whenever I approach my house, so it seems to me that Android's network service discovery is adequate for at least some purposes, whether it uses mDNS or not (I'm pretty sure Sonos uses multicast HTTP, FWIW.)

Android doesn't resolve names like machinename.local though. At least not for me - I hit this problem on a Nexus 7 just this weekend. I ended up putting the IP address in. Perhaps it is application specific, though name resolution seems like something that'd be baked in at a lower level than that. Anyway I tried in Firefox where it attempted to resolve www.machinename.local, and also a VNC application which just timed out.

Re: The Sorry State of Peer-to-Peer iOS-to-Android connectivity

#24

Post by noisy_boy »

This ongoing attempt by Apple to hobble iOS is why I've decided that my next device would be an Android device. I'll have access to filesystem, I can run an SSH server on my phone which means I basically can do pretty much everything I need to spend less time "managing" my content without having to buy into an whole eco system of Apple devices. E.g. i can push new music files automatically to my phone via a script), access newer photos/videos taken on my phone on various trips and sync them back to my computer (without having to rely on cloud etc).

Re: The Sorry State of Peer-to-Peer iOS-to-Android connectivity

#25

Post by hahainternet »

fidotron wrote: post #6

This is the main area where I suspect Google's greater reliance on clouds leads them to castrate their operating systems. Last time I checked Chrome OS still didn't even support Bonjour mDNS. (Still the case, and it's related to this first mentioned in 2009: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=13573 ) The Android stuff alone is an inconsistent trainwreck (because not all hardware supports all options…

> Apple really have been leading the sane local peer-to-peer world ever since Bonjour first appeared, and the new developments have just extended their lead.

It's not hard to be a 'leader' when there's only 5 or so products to communicate with.

Clearly they don't support anything other than this, and so calling it a 'lead' is hilarious when you have to have everyone you might want to communicate with buy the same product as you.

What rot.

Re: The Sorry State of Peer-to-Peer iOS-to-Android connectivity

#26

Post by thrownaway2424 »

rquirk wrote: post #23
thrownaway2424 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Android immediately becomes the remote control of my Sonos system whenever I approach my house, so it seems to me that Android's network service discovery is adequate for at least some purposes, whether it uses mDNS or not (I'm pretty sure Sonos uses multicast HTTP, FWIW.)

Android doesn't resolve names like machinename.local though. At least not for me - I hit this problem on a Nexus 7 just this weekend. I ended up putting the IP address in. Perhaps it is application specific, though name resolution seems like something that'd be baked in at a lower level than that. Anyway I tried in Firefox where it attempted to resolve www.machinename.local, and also a VNC application which just time…

I imagine that allowing multicast resolution system-wide is fraught with security problems, and most Android phones are whored out to random wifi networks all over the world.
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