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AirDrop Anywhere – Making it work on Windows

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Re: AirDrop Anywhere – Making it work on Windows

#31

Post by WorldMaker »

rektide wrote: post #28
WorldMaker wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows 10 has Miracast built in and has encouraged wifi drivers to support it. Miracast is built on top of Wifi Direct like most of these other p2p tools. Windows also has a hard to find "AirDrop"-like system, but between having no mobile devices anymore and incompatibility with Google and Apple's proprietary systems no one thinks to use it (because it's mostly just useful between Windows devices and at that point y…

Excellent point about Miracast. It'd be interesting to see some example code that makes use of any platform SDKs windows has available for doing wifi-p2p connectivity with peers. Going from "this is a capability windows uses" to "this is a capability of the platform folks can use" is another jump in meta-level towards encouraging the virtuous hardware/software adoption cycle.

Seems the API is named almost exactly what you would expect, Windows.Devices.WifiDirect:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/uwp/api/Windows.Devices.WiF...

Re: AirDrop Anywhere – Making it work on Windows

#32

Post by perryizgr8 »

StavrosK wrote: post #6
perryizgr8 wrote: post #5

I appreciate the hard work and expertise. But I absolutely do not get the point in reverse engineering a protocol that has been actively closed off. We can all come up with a universal airdrop RFC instead. That effort would be better spent. It's not some magic, it will be a very simple protocol.

Probably because reverse-engineering it is less effort than rewriting all the clients that Apple has already written.

AFAIK Apple has written exactly 2 clients (Ios and Macos). It shouldn't be too hard to write 2 extra clients. In return you get to design your own open protocol from scratch and don't need to rely on Apple not breaking it at any point of time.
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