One of the things I really like about Apple’s ecosystem is the cross-platform integration of a functionality called “AirDrop” which lets you fast, wirelessly and offline transfer (big) files between Apple devices that are close to each other, be it Mac, iPhone or iPad. This is extremely helpful when transferring video files which as we all know can get pretty heavy these days, particularly if one records in UHD/4K. Shooting on an iPhone and then transferring the footage to an iPad for editing with a bigger screen is a pretty popular workflow. Android on the other hand had something called “WiFi Direct” relatively early in its career but it never got picked up consistently by phone makers which preferred to introduce their own proprietary file transfer solutions which of course only worked with phones/devices of the same brand. So for quite a while I resorted to third party apps like Feem and Send Anywhere that also worked cross-platform between mobile and desktop – Android, iOS, macOS and Windows. As for Android-to-Android device wireless file transfers, Google introduced an app called “Files Go” (today Files by Google) in late 2017 which was primarily a file explorer but also had the ability to share files offline to another device by creating a WiFi Direct connection. While the app ventured somewhat close towards becoming a system resource in that it came pre-installed on many new phones as part of Google’s app portfolio, it was hard to deny that Apple’s AirDrop was more easily accessible.

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