We can argue endlessly about how innovative Apple is as a company, and indeed many people do. Personally, I would argue that some of its greatest innovations have been in the seemingly smallest of features, and AirDrop is one of these.
AirDrop is a really simple and convenient way to move a document from one of our Apple devices to another, as well as to exchange files and information with other iPhone users. The introduction of NameDrop in iOS 17 was a particularly great application of the tech in my view …
It’s been said that one of the hallmarks of great design is that once it has been created, it seems blindingly obvious in hindsight, as either the best possible way to do something or even the only way that makes sense. I think AirDrop in general comes close to meeting this definition, and NameDrop absolutely does so.
If you and I meet and want to swap contact details, all we need to do is bring our iPhones close together and say yes when offered the option of exchanging details. That’s just a beautiful combination of hardware and software design.
When a company comes up with an idea like this, it has a key decision to make. Does it keep the feature exclusive to its own products or make it more widely available as a de facto industry standard?
Apple has come down on each side of this dilemma in different situations. The company famously keeps the iMessage protocol exclusive to its own devices, resulting in the blue/green bubble phenomenon. It even resisted the halfway house of RCS support for an extremely long time.
There have been other cases where Apple has shared its technological innovations. For example, it made the MagSafe standard available to the rest of the industry in the form of Qi 2, which was essentially just a rebranding of the same thing. Similarly, by supporting the Matter standard, Apple essentially gave up on the exclusivity of some HomeKit-specific standards in order to contribute to a more secure, broader smart home ecosystem.
We’ve seen the same thing happen with AirDrop. As our sister site 9to5Google reported yesterday, two more Android phones have just offered support for AirDrop, after the feature first landed in the Pixel 10 a few months ago.
Following an expansion from Pixel to Samsung Galaxy, Google’s support for AirDrop over Quick Share is now showing up on more Android phones, starting with two models from Oppo and Vivo.
Personally, I’m all for this. AirDrop is a really convenient way to exchange files with people, and some of my friends do inexplicably use Android devices, so I’m very happy to see this become a platform-agnostic feature. I very much hope Apple also permits NameDrop to be used with Android devices.
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