Live data from Hacker News

Android and iPhone users can now share files, starting with the Pixel 10

blog.google

351–360 of 585 posts

Re: Android and iPhone users can now share files, starting with the Pixel 10

#351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look, you might be right. But you might be wrong. We don't know for sure. One of my first jobs was in infosec, and there was a sign above one of the senior consultant's door quoting Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". That quote is right. There's so much going on at any medium-to-large organisation, from engineering to politics and personalities. All that multi…

Your reply makes sense in a vacuum, but in reality we have the context of having seen Apple comply with regulation maliciously before, so we do know for sure that there's no macOS in the sdk because they weren't forced to by regulation.

> we do know for sure that there's no macOS in the sdk because they weren't forced to by regulation.

Unless you have insider knowledge, we don't know anything for sure here. Apple isn't a person. Apple doesn't have a single, consistent opinion when it comes to openness and EU regulation. (And even a person can change their mind.) All we know is that some teams at apple responded in the past to some EU regulation with malicious compliance. That doesn't tell us for sure what apple will do here.

Apple is 165 000 people. That's a lot of people. A lot more people than comment regularly on HN, and look at us! We don't agree about anything. I'm sure plenty of apple's employees hate EU regulation. And plenty more would love to opensource everything apple does.

That sort of inconsistency is exactly what we see across apple's product line. The Swift programming language is opensource. But SwiftUI is closed source. Webkit and FoundationDB are opensource. But almost everything on iOS is closed source. Apple sometimes promotes open standards - like pushing Firewire, USB and more recently USB-C - which they helped to design. But they also push plenty of proprietary standards that they keep under lock and key. Like the old 20-pin ipod connector, that companies had to pay money to apple to be allowed to use in 3rd party products. Or Airdrop. Or iMessage. AFS (apple filesystem) is closed source. But its also incredibly well documented. My guess is the engineers responsible want to support 3rd party implementations of AFS but for some reason they're prohibited from open-sourcing their own implementation.

We don't know anything for sure here. For my money, there's even odds in a year or two this API quietly becomes available on macos, watchos and tvos as well. If you "know for sure" that won't happen, lets make a bet at 100-1 odds. If you're sure, its free money for you.

Re: Android and iPhone users can now share files, starting with the Pixel 10

#352
post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A file system and its files are a very simple abstraction that lets us organize these exact things. I understand that some people get confused and overwhelmed by a directory structure, but I see that as an education problem, not a UX problem. I was taught all of this in elementary and middle school computer classes in the '90s and early '00s. Having this knowledge early on made me less afraid of my computer, made it…

its a UX probpem insofar as service providers will decide that since they give you a view over the file system, thats enough. i want file system access, but as a power tool. the 50 clicks through different folders is irrelevant to my most common 5 patterns of use. those should be a single click, or 0 clicks

I tried out zoxide and fzf ctrl-r history on linux (zsh) recently. Game changers.

Where is zoxide for my phone? Why is there so little innovation?

Trillion dollar companies can't come up with a single new thing. Or rather, won't come up with a single new thing because they're just useless rent seekers.

It's absolutely pathetic.

Re: Android and iPhone users can now share files, starting with the Pixel 10

#354

Am I right to assume that they simply implemented AirDrop without discussing with Apple?

You're right.

There is a different article with a comment by google here:

https://www.theverge.com/news/825228/iphone-airdrop-android-...

> Update, November 20th: Added a quote from a Google spokesperson confirming that Apple was not involved in the development of this feature.

Re: Android and iPhone users can now share files, starting with the Pixel 10

#355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Apple realised that phone users are interested in photos, videos, contacts, documents, appointments etc. not files

Despite others thinking you’re crazy, I think you are right. I remember the start of the smartphone era where many of my relatives switched to iPhone because "you know where the pictures are going and where to find them". The worst offender was my dad that had a Samsung phone running windows phone 6 (with an actual start menu) where you had to dig through folders to find jpeg files.

Weird story...people open up their gallery app and there are the pictures.

Never have been different. What did your relatives doing?

Re: Android and iPhone users can now share files, starting with the Pixel 10

#356

The fact that I get excited about this is actually a good representation much vendor lock there is. We used to be able to send files over Bluetooth before the iPhone came out.

Vendor lock has been here forever.

Here is a more hilarious attempt to break Vendor lock from the 90s!: https://youtu.be/TcJBXgmdX44?t=98

Things were more fun back then. Now Google vs Apple is so BORING! :D

Re: Android and iPhone users can now share files, starting with the Pixel 10

#358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was experimenting with this technology almost a decade ago as part of my work as interaction designer: https://darker.ink/writings/Mobile-design-with-device-to-dev... It has a lot of potential but unfortunately it has been kept back until now by lack of support and interoperability.

Waayy back in 2009 we had Bump [1], which allowed transfer between devices and later web apps as well – by banging your phone against the spacebar. It worked 98% of the time and was faster than AirDrop is today, even though we only had 3G. Google acquired it and immediately killed it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bump_(application)

If I am not mistaken, Bump still required a connection to the Internet. WiFi Aware does not, because the phones create an ad-hoc link on the spot.

The connection can be very fast. In this example, a 280 MB file is transferred in less than 10 seconds:

https://vimeo.com/418946837

Re: Android and iPhone users can now share files, starting with the Pixel 10

#359
post #146

This is based on Wi-Fi Aware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_Alliance#Wi-Fi_Aware Some background: https://www.ditto.com/blog/cross-platform-p2p-wi-fi-how-the-... On the Apple side, this was prompted by the EU Digital Markets Act: https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/questions-and-answe...

Do we know for a fact that DMA has anything to do with it? According to Google, Apple had nothing to do with this announcement. The way I have read it is a bunch of Google hackers reverse engineered Airdrop and that's that. And it's coming to other Android devices, so the Pixel 10 lock-in is just a marketing move.

Re: Android and iPhone users can now share files, starting with the Pixel 10

#360
post #146

This is based on Wi-Fi Aware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_Alliance#Wi-Fi_Aware Some background: https://www.ditto.com/blog/cross-platform-p2p-wi-fi-how-the-... On the Apple side, this was prompted by the EU Digital Markets Act: https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/questions-and-answe...

Do we know for a fact that DMA has anything to do with it? According to Google, Apple had nothing to do with this announcement. The way I have read it is a bunch of Google hackers reverse engineered Airdrop and that's that. And it's coming to other Android devices, so the Pixel 10 lock-in is just a marketing move.

The DMA forced Apple to move all of their P2P Wi-Fi stuff from their proprietary AWDL stack to the current Wi-Fi Aware-based implementation. Whatever work Google did to reverse engineer Airdrop was based on the Wi-Fi Aware implementation of Airdrop, rather than the older AWDL. They didn't get the whole stack for free, but it's not nothing either.
Post reply on HN