Waayy back in 2009 we had Bump [1], which allowed transfer between devices and later web apps as well – by banging your phone against the spacebar. It worked 98% of the time and was faster than AirDrop is today, even though we only had 3G.

Google acquired it and immediately killed it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bump_(application)

Waaay back when in Japan, sekigaisen (infrared) was a verb meaning to transfer contact details or photos or whatever between phones via infrared. It was amazing how fast the iPhone took over Japan and killed off their quirky phone ecosystem.

Edit: want to emphasize that it was totally ubiquitous. Every phone has it

yes, "beaming" in the us was also used for quite a while. as in IR beam

japanese phones were buggy, feature packed monstrosities. a bunch of companies fighting to check as many boxes as they could. it's not a surprise that they got wiped out by an attempt to make a holistic internet communicator.

but for a while, there was nothing like them and their ability to get information on the internet

My friends in school would send ringtones, wallpapers, and other small files through Bluetooth. It normally worked pretty well no matter the device.

Those were the good days of early bluetooth tech.

Everything got quickly walled off soon after, and for two decades we were left wondering why it wasn’t possible to share a picture from your phone to your computer, both BT-enabled, and instead must use proprietary protocols like AirDrop or convoluted steps in Windows. I hope these EU regulations will finally bring things back to how they should have always been.

I remember being blown away by the Gameboy Colour IR link. You could use it to trade Pokemon. That makes a bit more sense now if sekigaisen was already a popular ecosystem.

In the US (edit: and elsewhere!), "beaming" worked great between Apple Newton devices, including the pretty cool eMate 300 (an early Jony Ive creation, I just found on Wikipedia).

In 1993.

Microsoft Zune had the ability to send music wirelessly to other Zunes, it was called squirting

That's appalling. "Yo let me squirt you"

Somehow "squirting their users" perfectly defines Microsoft to this day

squirt me bro

I wonder if this was driven by the Palm Pilots in the early 2000s. We beamed contacts, calendar entries, whole apps via IR. At trade shows exhibitors had terminals that would constantly send out contact informations via OBEX (?).

And in Pokemon Gold/Silver/Crystal on GameBoy Color you could send Mystery gifts via IR!

Someone even ported it to an emulator! https://shonumi.github.io/articles/art11.html

Very cool, didn't know such app had existed, thank you! Wanted to use a similar approach to connect people in a smaller friends-only social network.

I can almost guarantee it wasn’t faster than airdrop (when it works) is today. I remember using bump on wifi, and it was limited to (shocking) wifi speeds at the time. I have as recently as last week transferred 1GB video files in under 20 seconds using airdrop. That simply was not possible in 2009.

airdrop uses wifi direct... so

Connection speed, not transfer speed indeed – that was purely network dependent. In any case nobody was transferring 1GB files from their phones at the time :)

Bump was like magic.

The only app I have ever truly thought “this is the future”

Bump didn't use direct device-to-device communication. A central server correlated the two bumping phones, based on geolocation and accelerometer data, then swapped the data via the server. At least that's how it worked in the early days. (Wiki page confirms)

Since it's relying on your internet connection, skeptical it'd be faster than AirDrop for a large amount of data like photos. But for swapping contacts I bet it was faster since it didn't have to spend time establishing a new direct connection.

I did not say it used device-to-device communication. It was the best possible experience for the time though, BT was not viable and wifi direct did not exist.

By faster I mean the initial handshake, it was basically instant. With AirDrop you sometimes experience quite a bit of signal hunting.

A comparable experience would be when you touch phones to share a contact, it was in that ballpark.

What's sad is what largely replaced device to device transfers was just messaging apps. But messaging apps compress media horribly. iMessage isn't so bad, but send a photo through almost anything else and all meta data is stripped, and the image resolution and bitrate are the absolute bare minimum to look ok on a phone. But try to print it and it will be horrible.

> iMessage isn't so bad

iMessage is very bad in certain circumstances, think if the recipient is on 3G or 4G it really compresses videos. It's not obvious and doesn't tell the recipient or offer an option so if you're working in video you keep being told "Can you make it higher res" when this happens

There could probably be a niche market (until platforms implement the functionality) for enhancing the metadata of Whatsapp pictures from family & friends and guess it from the context. i.e. your auntie sending you now a picture of yourself 30 years ago which will show up as dated 2025 by default, which totally sucks.

Your comment reminded me of this:

https://theyseeyourphotos.com/

Stripping the metadata on a photo is probably a feature though. For privacy reasons the default should most likely be that location, device info etc are taken out of photos that might go viral or be shared beyond what the original user intended.

It depends, I do wish it was an option that the user can pick from. Quite often you get sent photos of you or an event you were at and you'd like the metadata to be preserved. For posting on social media, sure it's best to strip it.

When I was pretty early in my career, I inherited a legacy project from the CTO who didn't want to maintain it anymore. We decided as a team that I'd just recreate the project with a modern tool chain.

A few weeks later, the CTO looked at my work and asked why it was missing xyz features from his legacy project, saying that if I'm gonna take a project and rewrite it, it better be at least as good as the old project.

It was a pretty good lesson for me to get early in my career, and I've carried it with me ever since. Don't break or rewrite that which already works.

It's evident that no one at Google ever got that lesson.

NB: I know Google definitely has other reasons for acquiring and killing off Bump — they were probably building a competing technology that was shitty and bump was doing it better and sooner than them so better to buy and kill than to make their own product better. But I think my the lesson from my anecdote still stands from a purely product point of view, and I feel like it should make business sense but apparently you can make bad micro business decisions as long as you can convince shareholders they were good macro business decisions.

I changed my thoughts on rewriting after reading this:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

PS: I just realized this article is older than some of the people here.

Wow! Not quite older than me, but my age was in the single digits :)

Thanks for sharing, it's always great to learn from folks who have been through it for literal decades.

I would rewrite if the alternative is maintaining bad code for a long time. But yeah, it’s best to be pessimistic. And be really careful about changes. There are books written about the methods to use.

The lesson I retain from a similar endeavor is that you should document all the usecase of a module or a project before rewriting them. And that task can be as exhausting as formally verifying the module.

Yeah, it could be several weeks or even months before even writing a single line of code depending on size of project. Important to do, but PMs would be a hard to sell that to :(

(Ideally these things are written while the code is being written but let's be honest, we rarely keep those up to date)

If I am not mistaken, Bump still required a connection to the Internet. WiFi Aware does not, because the phones create an ad-hoc link on the spot.

The connection can be very fast. In this example, a 280 MB file is transferred in less than 10 seconds:

https://vimeo.com/418946837

I do wonder how many great little user-friendly bits of software got destroyed in aquishutdowns. Incredible way to deploy capital to delete software, but that's the big internet world for you.

> Waayy back in 2009 we had Bump [1], which allowed transfer between devices and later web apps as well

Over the Internet. There are dozens of such services, and none of them can compete with Airdrop.

The main point of Airdrop is that it doesn't need Internet connectivity and won't use any metered data (or, on recent iOS versions, at least if Wi-Fi Assist is turned off, I believe).

Just as important is the fact that there's no need to install any application – any Apple device comes with Airdrop preinstalled.