We can talk endlessly about how innovative Apple is as a company, and indeed many people do. Personally, I’d say some of its biggest innovations lie in the seemingly smallest features, and AirDrop is one of them.
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 interesting application of the technology in my opinion…
It is said that one of the hallmarks of good design is that once created, it appears in hindsight as blindingly obvious, either as the best possible way to do something, or even as the only way that makes sense. I think AirDrop in general comes close to meeting this definition, and NameDrop absolutely does.
If you and I meet and want to exchange contact information, we simply bring our iPhones together and say yes when the opportunity to exchange information is offered. It’s just a nice combination of hardware and software design.
When a company comes up with an idea like this, they have to make a key decision. Does it keep this functionality exclusively for its own products or make it more widely available as a de facto industry standard?
Apple has found itself faced with this dilemma in different situations. The company keeps the iMessage protocol exclusive to its own devices, resulting in the blue/green bubble phenomenon. He even resisted support from the RCS for an extremely long time.
There have been other instances 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 Qi2, which was essentially just a rebranding of the same thing. Likewise, by supporting the Matter standard, Apple essentially gave up the exclusivity of certain HomeKit-specific standards in order to contribute to a more secure and broader smart home ecosystem.
We saw 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 appearing on more Android phones, starting with two models from Oppo and Vivo.
Personally, I completely agree. AirDrop is a very convenient way to exchange files with people, and some of my friends inexplicably use Android devices, so I’m very happy to see this become a platform-agnostic feature. I really hope Apple allows NameDrop to be used with Android devices as well.
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