[micheljansen]

I wonder if it's more reliable than Apple's own implementation for MacOs. It used to be rock solid – and between iOS devices it still is – but between Macs I regularly have to switch both to "Search for an older Mac" to make them see each other, with no explanation why.

[shimms]

I was complaining about this with a coworker today. AirDrop 1 was flawless, since 2.0 it has been more often than not unreliable between Macs.

I’d love to know if anyone knows the technical details about what caused this regression?

[flixic]

Interesting, my own experience has been the opposite. From what I remember v1 was constantly broken, initial v2 was not much better but now everything is very smooth all the time.

[AndrewStephens]

I had the same experience. The first AirDrop worked about 30% of the time, once AirDropv2 came along it works 90% of the time.

The "Share Only With Your Contacts" option still seems broken to me, I usually have to temporarily allow all access before AirDropping something.

[lostgame]

AirDrop 1 never worked for me, ever. With any combination of iOS or MacOS devices.

AirDrop 2 is still so finicky I just much rather put stuff on a USB key.

[knolan]

I had massive issues with Airdrop 2 when it first came out. After many lengthy chats with Apple support it managed to resolve itself. All I can offer and a working solution is signing out and back into iCloud on each affected device. This of course comes with the resync penalty.

[DerDangDerDang]

I’ve found it very flaky on iOS - regularly try to transfer between my phone and my wife’s sitting next to each other and it will randomly not see the other phone or take minutes to find it :(

When it works, it just works.

[jclardy]

I've never had issues with iOS - discovery is near immediate every time. The only time I've had issues is when sharing with random people that have it set to contacts only and we haven't shared a contact, or if someone turned wifi off manually.

On the Mac though, it is a different story. Just yesterday my wife was trying to send me a PDF and I had to send it to my phone from her Mac, then dump it into iCloud Drive. I rebooted my Mac and then it worked again - but these are stock 2018/2019 Apple laptops, they shouldn't have these issues.

[cerberusss]

Yep, for me it's also quite flaky. When I mentioned this to a friend, he asked me if I was kidding -- it always worked for him.

[chapium]

I found that the macos firewall is to blame.