> I think people mean something seamless like AirDrop is on Apple devides

Ha! I do wonder if I'm the only person who has errors where sometimes an AirDrop attempted transmission, from two devices sitting right next to each other, just hangs indefinitely, even if a transmission between the same two devices a minute ago succeeds. Like all Apple solutions that Just Work, it's great when it Just Works, but, when it doesn't, great effort seems to have been taken to make sure that there's no way to find out why not.

Torrents can be seamless. I take it you haven't used a download manager that would just grab any file, treating torrents just like any other download, as seamless as HTTP downloads are?

It doesn't have to be a dedicated system where you manage how long you seed, port forward, and other technical requirements: torrents already work well when you just seed while downloading because the server can never get overloaded, pretty much no matter how viral something goes. So long as it keeps serving the tiny torrent file, a few blocks on occasion, and the few packets needed to set up a NAT punch between people (STUN/TURN server? I always forget what's what), people can get the file from each other and you don't have huge bandwidth costs or have the site go down once the included bandwidth is exhausted. There's a reason Facebook and Twitter use(d?) this for distributing server updates¹, and I don't think someone remotes onto every server to visit the pirate bay, which torrent technology has sadly become synonymous to and people don't realise it is a transfer protocol just like FTP, HTTP, and other TPs that I'm forgetting

> some public standard that gets implemented on all platforms

What this is based on doesn't matter. It can be http, it can also be torrents. It's not very useful if you're sending files from and to one person almost every time (perhaps at the end of a holiday with friends, more than one person would want everyone's photos, but still), I'm just objecting to torrents being misunderstood as the only thing most people used it for: downloading copyrighted material in dedicated (and often unwieldy) software :)

¹ https://torrentfreak.com/facebook-uses-bittorrent-and-they-l... Article also mentions that a university cut 20 of the 22 update-distributing servers, I didn't know of that example

There’s no incentive for big players to play nicely with other platforms so they just won’t. Hardware standards like Qi2 are different since it affects costs directly. Software is usually built for lock-in since quite some time.

“Buy your mom an iPhone” and how Apple buried beeper mini into nonexistence was a nice example.

"Securely" is doing a lot of work here; you need some out of band mechanism to transfer the link in the first place, to determine who you're getting the file from, and then you might as well use that to transfer the file instead. Also people want to be able to do it asynchronously, so they use things like WeTransfer.

During the brief period that open Airdrop / bluetooth file transfer was a thing, there was a short fad of spamming porn to nearby people on public transport. So that was the end of that.

> During the brief period that open Airdrop / bluetooth file transfer was a thing, there was a short fad of spamming porn to nearby people on public transport. So that was the end of that.

My recollection is that the end of that was Apple's worry about the protests in China, not any concern about spam on public transit. (The first Google hit: https://restofworld.org/2022/apple-airdrop-china-memes/.)

Seems like such a simple fix though... Blur the shared photos unless you tap preview. Or unless it's coming from someone you have in your contacts. Or just not have it show the preview at all and obviously you would decline files from someone you aren't expecting to receive files from.

Or the simple fix of just not having this P2P transfer option always enabled. It should be off until you toggle it on because you and someone you are with want to transfer a file.

I believe that's what Apple did for AirDrop, "Everyone for 10 Minutes" is available in AirDrop settings. You can also use NFC (Near-field communication) to initiate a transfer with a non-Contact, while optionally establishing a Contact relationship. If only this were also available on Android.

I think it'd be great if Apple supported this, even if it meant an Apple AirDrop app for Android. Especially if it meant an Apple AirDrop app for Android.

I had a lot of fun airdropping rickroll videos to nearby phones while waiting for rides in disneyland

The DHT exists, all you need is an infohash and you get grab the metadata from peers/uploader.

libtorrent supports something called 'SSL' torrents that require both peers to be signed by the same root.

All the pieces are there to build on top of.

AirDrop was a huge asset to protestors in Taiwan. It was heavily used for mass demonstrations. Something that works cross-platform could be really great for political movements