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A comment on Free and Open Source Alternative to Airdrop. Parent comment

Re:Free and Open Source Alternative to Airdrop by j1elo on Sunday January 21, 2024 @11:00AM (#39079593)
Apple usually does excellent integrations between their devices. But I haven't used AirDrop so I'm not familiar with how it works: in order to create an ad-hoc wireless connection, if the devices were already connected to some wifi access point, are they temporarily disconnected for the duration of the ad-hoc connection?

If not, I'd guess that Apple devices maybe come with 2 WiFi adapters inside?

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Re:Free and Open Source Alternative to Airdrop by neilalexander on Sunday January 21, 2024 @11:17AM (#39079800)
Neither — frequency hopping is used so that the device can establish AWDL connectivity directly with nearby devices while maintaining a connection to an access point, while still only having a single Wi-Fi adapter.
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Re:Free and Open Source Alternative to Airdrop by j1elo on Sunday January 21, 2024 @11:34AM (#39079957)
> frequency hopping

That this is possible, and allows to maintain a dual connection to an AP and an ad-hoc connection to another device for AirDrop, sounds amazing. Now I want to learn more about that technique and where/how it can be applied to non-Apple devices!

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Re:Free and Open Source Alternative to Airdrop by neilalexander on Sunday January 21, 2024 @11:45AM (#39080078)
Bluetooth does it too!
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Re:Free and Open Source Alternative to Airdrop by solardev on Sunday January 21, 2024 @11:48AM (#39080102)
It's hard enough to get Bluetooth to connect to one device!
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Re:Free and Open Source Alternative to Airdrop by fnordpiglet on Sunday January 21, 2024 @12:14PM (#39080349)
To be fair it’s great at connecting to every device within 100 meters other than the one in your hand.
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Re:Free and Open Source Alternative to Airdrop by lostlogin on Sunday January 21, 2024 @12:48PM (#39080697)
The next version fixes this problem and uses less power.

And yes, I’m being sarcastic.

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Re:Free and Open Source Alternative to Airdrop by BossingAround on Sunday January 21, 2024 @01:28PM (#39081183)
Honestly, I've been having excellent experience with BT (and headphones) with modern devices.

For example, my Lenovo T14s (2023 AMD version running the latest kernel) connects to my (5.2 version of BT) headphones really well. Similarly, my android phone connects to the same headphones and whatever device sends data, that's what I hear.

Similarly, my Steam Deck connects to two of the headphones I'm using (Sennheiser and Apple Airpods) seamlessly.

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Re:Free and Open Source Alternative to Airdrop by withinboredom on Sunday January 21, 2024 @12:14PM (#39080343)
At first, I thought you were alluding to Bluetooth file sharing, which Apple doesn’t support.
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Re:Free and Open Source Alternative to Airdrop by neilalexander on Monday January 22, 2024 @08:05AM (#39089066)
I was referring to frequency hopping. In any case Apple does support Bluetooth file transfer on macOS, just not on iOS.
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Re:Free and Open Source Alternative to Airdrop by pzmarzly on Sunday January 21, 2024 @11:04AM (#39079642)
AirPlay and Miracast both rely on WiFi (in case of Miracast it's WiFi Direct, for AirPlay I'm not sure), so it's not uncommon for WiFi chips to maintain 2 connections at once.
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Re:Free and Open Source Alternative to Airdrop by asylteltine on Sunday January 21, 2024 @11:04AM (#39079644)
No they don’t disconnect from WiFi and as of the latest iOS you can now leave airdrop radius and it will use the internet to continue transfer. Its magic
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Re:Free and Open Source Alternative to Airdrop by dartos on Sunday January 21, 2024 @11:05AM (#39079665)
IIRC Apple uses some proprietary radio protocol (or maybe it’s just Bluetooth) to discover and communicate with nearby Apple products.
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Re:Free and Open Source Alternative to Airdrop by nsagent on Sunday January 21, 2024 @11:44AM (#39080059)
It uses Bonjour [1], which has an LGPL reimplementation named Avahi [2]

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonjour_(software)

[2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avahi_(software)

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Re:Free and Open Source Alternative to Airdrop by d1sxeyes on Sunday January 21, 2024 @11:50AM (#39080116)
For the sake of being picky, Bonjour is not a radio protocol (Layer 1), it’s a set of tools which enable zero config networking (Layer 2/3)
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Re:Free and Open Source Alternative to Airdrop by nsagent on Sunday January 21, 2024 @12:51PM (#39080737)
I agree, it's not a radio protocol and I wasn't trying to imply that it was. The person I was responding to posited it might be one and I pointed them to the protocol that's used without explicitly correcting them on that point.
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Re:Free and Open Source Alternative to Airdrop by d1sxeyes on Sunday January 21, 2024 @02:45PM (#39082210)
Makes sense.
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Re:Free and Open Source Alternative to Airdrop by dartos on Tuesday January 23, 2024 @09:23AM (#39103632)
It can’t use just bonjour.

Apple devices can detect out of network devices as well.

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