- Surprisingly, Google’s Quick Share now works with AirDrop
- Apple has apparently been left in the dark and may attempt to shut it down
- Still, there is reason to believe that Apple could leave this feature in effect
In a surprise announcement yesterday, Google revealed that it has made its Quick Share feature compatible with Apple’s AirDrop when using a Pixel 10 device. In other words, you can now share files seamlessly between select Android and iOS devices, quickly and securely.
However, reading Google’s press release, something interesting emerged: Apple apparently wasn’t involved in this announcement, and the company may not even have been aware of its arrival.
After all, a second Google blog post noted that the company would “welcome the opportunity to work with Apple” to enable more comprehensive collaboration between Quick Share and AirDrop in the future, implying that Apple wasn’t part of the engineering effort to make it work in the first place. This raises a key question: Will Apple abandon the sword of Damocles and try to disable the new feature?
This kind of action on Apple’s part would not be unprecedented. In 2023, messaging app Beeper reverse engineered Apple’s iMessage platform to allow blue bubble texting to work between iPhones and Android devices. Apple was not very friendly to this type of hacked engineering and forced Beeper to abandon this feature.
Even if Apple doesn’t actively force Google to reverse its announcement, it’s unlikely that Tim Cook and his colleagues would be happy to be caught off guard (assuming there weren’t any behind-the-scenes discussions).
Apple likes to control the narrative and is fiercely protective of its proprietary technologies. Dismantling the company’s walled garden, taking AirDrop where it was never intended to go, and announcing it to the world without Apple’s input all feels like anathema to the Apple we know so well. So what happens next?
Could it be different this time?
That said, there are three main reasons to believe that Apple could actually hold back the fire and allow Google’s new project to continue, even if Apple doesn’t work to actively improve the feature in the future.
On the one hand, there is the European Union (EU). Apple has been under constant EU scrutiny for years due to its ecosystem and allegedly anti-competitive practices, with much of the focus placed on features exclusive to Apple devices.
The EU wants Apple to make some of these technologies available to its competitors for free. Therefore, allowing Quick Share to work with AirDrop could be a way for Apple to take some heat from the EU. This resulted in a new API called Wi-Fi Aware appearing in iOS 26, which allows third-party apps to discover and connect to nearby devices over Wi-Fi – in other words, AirDrop alternatives.
Second, Google and Apple have been working together much more closely lately, sometimes more enthusiastically than others. The two collaborated to enable the RCS messaging standard to come to iOS, for example, while there are strong rumors that the next version of Siri, based on artificial intelligence, will leverage Google Gemini to do the heavy lifting.
Finally, there is also the question of whether Apple is even capable of technically blocking Google’s AirDrop movement. Several journalists, including The Verge’s Tom Warren, speculated that AirDrop has no way to validate devices unless a user is in Contacts-only mode — something Google’s implementation avoids by sticking to AirDrop’s Everyone mode for 10 minutes.
If accurate, it would explain why various third-party AirDrop-to-Android hacks have been around for some time and potentially leave Apple unable to stop Google’s move other than through diplomacy.
But given that such a move could cause the EU to choke, Apple is likely reluctant to follow this path. This could mean that Android and Apple fans could use this new feature for the foreseeable future. However, nothing is guaranteed – perhaps an Apple engineer can fix this by changing how AirDrop works – so keep your eyes peeled for updates.
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