That's what was confusing to me. It's one thing for Apple to add wifi aware by force, it would be another for them to completely reimplement Airdrop with it. I don't think they were required to do that.

They were required to drop AWDL, yes. They had to reimplement AirDrop.

https://www.ditto.com/blog/cross-platform-p2p-wi-fi-how-the-...

They are not required to drop awdl, they just have to support wifi aware as well.

They weren't specifically required to drop AWDL, they were just required to implement WiFi-Aware in such a manner that neither technology had an advantage.

In theory Apple could've maintained both, but that seems like a waste of development time to me.

I doubt they would've had to implement any specific protocol if they had just opened up AWDL, but I suppose they'd rather keep that closed to maintain the ability to guard their walled garden in non-EU devices.

> In theory Apple could've maintained both, but that seems like a waste of development time to me.

They need Airdrop to work with phones who haven’t upgraded, so doesn’t feel like a waste to me. And they already have working AWDL code, so it’s just maintenance, probably not a ton of work.

So does Mac OS support Wifi Aware now? I didn't think so, which is confusing if Airdrop still works between iOS and Mac OS.

In the last link provided by parent you can read:

> Close-range wireless file transfers: this feature allows to access the same iOS-controlled features as Apple’s services in third-party file sharing apps, creating, for example, alternatives to AirDrop.

As you can read here (https://www.ditto.com/blog/cross-platform-p2p-wi-fi-how-the-...):

> Under pressure from the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), Apple is being forced to ditch its proprietary peer-to-peer Wi-Fi protocol – Apple Wireless Direct Link (AWDL) – in favor of the industry-standard Wi-Fi Aware, also known as Neighbor Awareness Networking (NAN). A quietly published EU interoperability roadmap mandates Apple support Wi-Fi Aware 4.0 in iOS 19 and v5.0,1 thereafter, essentially forcing AWDL into retirement. This post investigates how we got here (from Wi-Fi Direct to AWDL to Wi-Fi Aware), what makes Wi-Fi Aware technically superior, and why this shift unlocks true cross-platform peer-to-peer connectivity for developers.