The EU made Apple adopt new Wi-Fi standards, and now Android can support AirDrop (opens in new tab)

In 2020 Google's Project Zero found a zero-click remote RCE in Apple's AWDL implementation. So at least some folks at Google are fully equipped to build a reverse engineered implementation. Discussion on that awhile back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25270184

Yeah, people have confirmed it works with iOS 15, so it seems more likely that Google implemented AWDL.

> macOS devices, which are not listed as being supported on the Wi-Fi Aware page.

Not listed, but shipped with some Wifi Aware library

/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/DeviceToDeviceManager.framework/Plugins/WiFiAwareD2DPlugin.bundle

Both can still be true. The interop may be motivated by the EU regulator's intention so and to stave off further regulation.

> "essential public infrastructure"

If people wanted these devices and services to be public infrastructure, they should be developed and maintained using public funds.

Don't forget that Apple is feeling sore and playing the petulant child in their PR regarding EU regulations, especially regarding the digital markets act. They don't want to appear to give in the EU, so I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Apple doesn't want to admit that the EU forced them.

I don't care which sovereign state or union forces the trillion dollar tech giant to behave. I'm just glad it happened. And I applaud China if this was their victory.

I want it to happen with a thousand times more intensity for Apple and Google.

We should own these devices. We shouldn't be subsistence farmers on the most important device category in the world.

They need to be opened up to competition, standards, right to repair, privacy, web app installs, browser choice, messaging, etc. etc.

They shouldn't be strong arming tiny developers or the entire automotive industry. It's vastly unfair. And this strip mining impacts us as consumers.

There is very little literature about Chinese requirements rolled out

and when there is, its talked about as American tech companies bowing to an authoritarian regime as opposed to fighting a burgeoning market force acting on behalf of consumers and the American tech companies losing that fight

the latter is how the EU work is syndicated

in between is that there likely is no fight with Chinese regulators alongside an unwillingness to alter access to that market

Imo kinda same about usb-c on iphone. The writing was on the wall that they were transitioning devices away from lightning to usb-c, a standard they too had their hands in. Especially so when wanting to position the pro model iphones as professional cameras with external storage capable of doing decent levels of prores to boot, they werent about to make lightning ssds to do the job.

The only thing perhaps expedited was the push to have it on base model iphones sooner.

Same with usb-c when Apple was one of the main drivers of usb-c adoption.

Apple _did_ adopt and support Wi-Fi Aware as a protocol iOS supports. It just doesn’t use it for AirDrop.

Why would that be likely

That’s unlikely.

It's unclear exactly what you're arguing, but I think if you are arguing that, because of the unavoidable substantial friction caused by regulation, we shouldn't have any regulation of industry at all... I think it's trivial to find examples where banning all regulation of industry would make the world a much, much worse place. Much worse than the friction.

Even though overly broad regulation is a risk, I don't believe little/no regulation is an option either. I don't think the US's consumer protection mechanisms work, and I'm happy to accept the downsides of the EU's systems that come with the upsides of regulation.

I really wish microeconomics was a high-school or secondary school required course. It's one of the most applicable to life and voters well-studied disciplines that describes the effects of certain actions towards or away from a competitive market, market elasticity and barriers to entry, explains positive and negative externalities of government action, and how those actions affect consumer pricing and supply (a lot of the topics here and below). Without studying this topic we view words with different underlying assumptions or definitions and it's a lot more effort / time / replies to not talk around each other. It's like two people who only use Windows for Instagram trying to argue about why Apt requiring Rust is good or bad. I'm not weighing in for or against the topic in this thread or its replies, just a plug to study Microeconomics if this stuff interests you!

I mean, housing and medical treatment are more expensive in the US because the market is unregulated and so the capital exploits the poor who can't do otherwise for those basic needs.

You defeated your own argument ? Thanks !

Apple said from the day that they made lightning cables that it would be supported for 10 years. They literally contractually guaranteed that to third party manufacturers in exchange for them creating a massive availability of cables for Apple users.

The EU “forced them” to switch to the standard they helped develop (USB C) on the 11th year after developing lighting. I’m sure it was all the EUs doing.

Apple also helped develop ARM, but I believe nobody likes to talk about that.

I wonder when the Europe is going to open up European companies like ASML, who are pretty much the de facto monopolies in their field. I believe the Nexperia incident showed that there's also a lot of political and national reasons behind such decisions, not just creating open and fair markets.

That did turn a huge number of chargers and accessories into e-waste though...

Users all got to complain that the EU are the meanies responsible for their old wires and chargers and accessory no longer being compatible, but it seems infinitely more likely that Apple was going to adopt USB-C on largely the same schedule even if the EU didn't intercede.

To be clear, Apple had already moved their laptops and computers to USB-C -- long in advance of almost any one else -- and had moved their iPad Pros and Air to USB-C, building out the accessory set supporting the same, years before the EU decree. Pretty convenient when they get to blame the EU for their smartphones making the utterly inevitable move.

Apple used USB-C on the iPhone 15 and 16 without being forced to do so. If Apple was indeed forced to use USB-C they would have postponed it to the 17.

Do you also think Apple was forced to use USB-C on the iPad and MacBook?

Hah, right? Everyone understands that Apple wouldn't have done anything by themselves if it wasn't for the DMA.

The whole selling point of Apple was that as long as you're inside the ecosystem, you'll get the smoothest experience. Well, now the law says that devices, apps and products from third parties should be able to be used on an iPhone as seamlessly as Apple's own products, of course they wouldn't have given that up willingly.

The moat gets mighty large when the government regulators start making it bigger. That's one of the advantages that the Mag 7 has now - it's not just the scale but it's also the compliance burden for new entrants.

It is literally correct. My point was I think it implies the EU had to force a totally belligerent Apple (which we’ve certainly seen) instead of Apple already working on this and EU perhaps speeding the timeline a little.

If a law forced Apple to do good for everyone, not just a small group of people, isn't that a good thing? It wasn't exactly that AirDrop got legislated, but thanks to the DMA, AirDrop (and other things) are within scope and they now have to make things more seamless for everyone. Win-win no?

Don't worry, the United States is always eager to prove that you can neglect both consumer rights and user privacy at the same time.

The national governments are to blame, not the EU.

Yep seen this before too.

An implementation of AWDL on Linux requires a Wi-Fi card that supports "active monitor mode with frame injection". [1] I looked into using it with an Intel Wi-Fi card I had and it appeared mine wasn't supported. I'm guessing the situation is similar on Android in terms of SoC support.

[1]: https://github.com/seemoo-lab/owl?tab=readme-ov-file#require...

The account requirement for nearby share is, as I understand it, to enable "contacts only" mode, which is how you prevent people from receiving random dickpics the second they try out the protocol and permanently turn the feature off afterwards. I think NS also has some kind of cloud transfer backup connection in case local transfers don't work (using Samsung's cloud), but I'm not 100% sure if that's related.

The account requirement can already be avoided using existing implementations of standard QuickShare (i.e. https://henriqueclaranhan.github.io/rquickshare/) but those are limited to devices sharing the same WiFi connection. However, as there is no contact sharing between iOS and Android, interoperability basically forces Google to pick between "Google account optional" and "doesn't work with iOS".

It's within range because it works, but requires some twisting and arm waving to get it to work from one room to the next, no Faraday shields in the home.

Then again, I transferred 4 iPhone photos to the imac 2 feet away and it failed. Worked on the next try. It's flakey as hell, and this is a 3rd generation iPhone SE and M2 mac mini. Not exactly old. I really hate bluetooth.

I got an old Time Capsule at the thrift store, that checked out but I haven't made use of it. It might be time. FWIW, I got PhotoSync app (not free) long ago so as to share photos with "everything" and it runs in the background on the mac, but I stupidly hold to the notion that whatever comes with the operating system otta work.

While I really like the convenience of not having multiple different cables to charge my devices when travelling, I agree with you on cleaning the usb-c port. In that respect, the lightning design was a lot more elegant and made more sense for a pocketable device.

Plastic dental picks work great for cleaning USB-C ports.

iPhone docks and speakers were already obsolete. They had a moment during the 30-pin era, but its been long since Bluetooth, Carplay took over in any mainstream use.

We call them "LINO"s.

Sure, because I think that, ultimately excessive regulation stifles innovation. I mean, heck, the EU is looking to effectively dismantle GDPR because they're worried that it's going to cause them to miss out on the AI boom.

My point was just that Apple is such an outrageously bad actor (and the USB-C and Airdrop rules so beneficial) that these rules were getting even a very pro-market person like me to at least be open to the idea of regulating some of these out-of-control giants.

The problem isn't E2E encrypted group video calls. FaceTime supports that. The issue is interoperability with E2E encryption.

If Apple says sure, implement this FaceTime spec. Facebook does the same thing, go ahead and implement Messenger video chat.

Now you have the Android NewVideoChat app which supports its own protocol, Facebook's and Apple's. A user with NewVideoChat tries to invite a NewVideoChat user, an Apple user and a Facebook user to a video chat.

Except Facebook Messenger's app doesn't support Apple's Facetime app doesn't support Facebook Messenger, so you run into some issues. Something needs to dupe the stream out to all three services which use radically different payloads and encryption methods - and they have to do it without breaking end-to-end encryption. Do it at the client-side and the Android app users will need to dupe their own streams three times and at least one user will need to relay the other two other streams, with all the bandwidth and latency issues that entails. Do it on the server side and you somehow need to translate between protocols (and possibly codecs!) without decrypting them.

And if your video group chat supports private messaging between a subset of participants, you can end up in a situation where a Facebook user wants to send something to a Facetime user without the NewVideoChat user seeing it.. which is a bit of a problem.

Yes. The only caveat is that since LocalSend isn't blessed by Apple, it isn't automatically invoked and you have to start it manually to receive.

sadly, I agree with your take.

We do see competition there, iMessage is superior, so many android apps try to emulate it. thunderbolt was around before USB 4, lightning was before USB-C, the Apple appstore is still a model of better quality/security. You can see google trying to emulate that and requiring devs to id themselves (competition isn't always pleasant). Why would you spend making something better, if it doesn't give your company a competitive edge? If you're forced to help your competition have the same capability, where is the ROI?

> Apple considers themselves above competition

In literally every market apple is in, they have intense competition!?

> they ultimately decide what is righteous and anyone who disagrees buys a different phone

Ugh.. yeah.. shouldn't they be allowed to sell things that they believe will sell well? I mean on one hand people complain about cheap devices engineered with planned obsolescence, and then you complain about what.. better quality? If they believe it is a superior system, then certain, I want that as a consumer. Why don't you? And I also thing being able to buy a different phone is great, that means no monopolies, that's what we all want right?

> neither get superior software solutions nor cheaper products.

I am getting a superior hardware and software for apple. What his happening now is, for no amount of money I could possibly earn can I get a good quality product, I have to settle with EU's forced mediocrity even though I don't live in the EU. People who can't afford apple products have alternatives, but that isn't enough for you, you want everyone to get participation trophies? that's what it sounds like, i could be wrong, it sounds like you don't want to feel envious of people who get superior products? Even though there are many android phones more expensive than iPhones, so it isn't even a question of affordability. it's just forced mediocrity. With no upsides to anyone other than people who feel great about "america bad" "middle finger to apple".

>Okay, so, why don't we see competition in places where it matters, like Airdrop, iMessage and the App Store?

Honestly, because Apple has always had the major advantage of being one company, whereas and Android market is fragments, with both prod and cons. That Samsung competes decently with Apple because they've created kind of their own ecosystem shows exactly why it is important to regular interoperability and prevent walled garden behaviours.

Otherwise we'll end up with just Apple/Samsung. Or perhaps even just Apple...which I know the cult will argue would be a great thing.

It's the same everywhere; countries with a 2 party political system always experience huge problems because of it.

oops, I meant FCC, edited it.