[ducleonctor]

I have tried to understand the reason for this design limitation (no easy efficient peer to peer on phones) for a long time now.

I have come to the conclusion that the inability to communicate is not a fail but intended.

It seems like security and business interests are standing in the way, not primarily technical hurdles.

Mesh networking and service discovery are issues where technical solutions exist. But their application is slowed or blocked by network operators and phone/OS manufacturers to enforce a central authority and paying subscribers.

Privacy concerns are often used to explain these decisions, but I see those as mere excuses. Mesh node identifiers could just be randomly regenerated periodically or handled anonymously. Also firewall rules could easily ensure only authorized services can communicate.

It was interesting to observe how quickly similar P2P features were enabled in the fight against Covid-19 (contact tracing via BLE advertisement packets).

At the same time it is harder than ever to use, for example, Android's WiFi or Bluetooth in an App-controlled manner. Only the central authority, not the owner of the device nor independent App developers are apparently supposed to actually use the devices capabilities.

Quite frustrating.

I have been thinking about building a generic case/USB gadget to enable free communication, but such a solution would have many drawbacks versus using the internal radios.

[lrem]

Privacy concerns are real, but possibly misguided. Mesh networking will obviously reveal much more to people around you than the centralised model. But in return you get shrouded from centralised infrastructure. It's a legitimate trade-off and I imagine people preferring one way or the other. But instead of talking about a trade-off, we tend to reject ideas because one of the aspects would regress.

[m4rtink]

I also think it's intended by the people actually paying for development of the phone hardware and OS. Also iOS being fully proprietary and even the open parts of Android being effectively developed by a privileged group of Google engineers with zero community input for project direction does not help...

The involved parties want to sell you cloud services(hello Google!), to have you use up mobile data & calls/SMS (hello operators! ) and ideally to throw the phone away after a year or two (hello manufacturers).

And all they need to do is build a device OS combo that needlessly peddles data via cloud somewhere on the internet, has not data card slot and can't talk directly to similar device on the table next to it...