Aren’t most android phones still able to share files via Bluetooth? I thought that was the whole shtick of android back when people actually compared the two platforms.
Comparing Bluetooth file share to airdrop might sound right on paper but the real world experience is very different. BT file share never worked consistently, was super slow, requires pairing the 2 devices together and a whole bunch of other annoyances. Android beam attempted to make the initial setup more convenient but I found it hard to get the phones lined up to initiate the transfer. Android now apparently has a direct airdrop clone which should work well
I’m not completely certain if some of the large android OEMs would get the same level of buy in with third parties.
Google would be best placed to present an open standard for android, at the risk of fragmentation or segmentation by the OEMs
Samsung seems the logical candidate to have the capability, on account of their broad broad product lineup.
That said, I’m not certain if Samsung has intentions to foster the association between their products and smaller companies in the eyes of consumers, like Apple does with its MFI program. Additionally Apple is quite happy to present products from companies it likes in their stores, something from my understanding which Samsung doesn’t do.
I see this feature becoming quite a common sight on higher value 3rd party products targeted towards the iOS market, at least initially.
If the “Find My” network, becomes popular among 3rd parties and customers, I suspect that any similar system that an android OEM or Google comes up with will have to be broadly similar in implementation to ease integration. Simply because they may not have the clout to get third parties to keep a special SKU just for your equipment.
It's not even that complex, just keep a hash of position fixes and MAC addresses and overwrite it occasionally. I could probably hack something "good enough" on my pinephone in under an hour.
There's the global network where everyone is sharing fixes though... oof I don't really even want to be part of that.
It's not complex to code a proof of concept good enough to check assumptions with a possible implementation. Now, for the implementation and roll out as a product you would be probably months to years away.
Why we developers like to be so optimistic about our own creations? I can definitely hack a lot of PoCs in short time if I don't have to care about security, other users and so on, the moment you start to introduce the real world into your little PoC is usually when a hack that took 1 day explodes into a months-long project. And for good reasons.
Last time I looked into this, Apple actually used quite a bit of clever crypto engineering to protect user privacy. It's not just a big database of locations that Apple keeps.