AirDrop Support Rolling Out to Samsung Galaxy S26 Devices This Week

Wish Apple just helped developing open standards, or at least established a reasonable period of exclusive usage of their technology and then let others in or adopt an open standard if it has caught up with their own.
I mean, the EU had to force them to drop their silly connector.

They have helped develop open standards. They helped with the development of USB-C, literally pioneered the acceptance of Wi-Fi, took part in creating the Matter smart home standard... does them wanting to have something for themselves with their own devices immediately downplay every other stride they've made?

These are features of convenience. They should be treated as such.

This is disgusting. Absolutely disgusting. This isn't a win for consumers, this sort of nonsense will actually discourage Apple from innovating. Whats the point if your technology is going to be stolen and copied anyway?

Might as well say you only want Macs to only access the Apple Internet and not the rest of the web. And iPhones should only be able to text other iPhones. Interoperability is a good thing.

EU didn't force something like that yet

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/the-eu-made-apple-adopt-new-wi-fi-standards-and-now-android-can-support-airdrop/

Wish Apple just helped developing open standards, or at least established a reasonable period of exclusive usage of their technology and then let others in or adopt an open standard if it has caught up with their own.
I mean, the EU had to force them to drop their silly connector.

Surprised Apple didn't block this yet over privacy concerns

Apple will not be able to block this if the EU forced them to use an open standard for Apple devices which is why Google and Samsung are now able to integrate the AirDrop functionality that some/most android users are envious of.

There are still some Apple-exclusive features that cannot be replicated by its competition.

They have helped develop open standards. They helped with the development of USB-C, literally pioneered the acceptance of Wi-Fi, took part in creating the Matter smart home standard... does them wanting to have something for themselves with their own devices immediately downplay every other stride they've made?

These are features of convenience. They should be treated as such.

I said "just". I know very well they very often helped open standards grow and thrive. HTML5 over Flash is the best thing they've done to the world. I just wish that was their go-to solution. And that, when they decided that they have to get their own thing instead, it wasn't so heavily closed for so long.

But also, transferring files is not a feature of convenience at all, it's a fundamental feature of a multi-purpose electronic device. A very snappy and painless wireless method of transfer is a nice addition but... they've spend years making all alternatives absurdly painful.
It used to be the easiest thing on PCs and it's been artificially made very complicated on Apple devices because of how closed their environment is. Airplay feels like magic when it works but also like hell when it doesn't. And, again, until they've been forced to use USB-C, you needed a proprietary adapter to even use something like a USB pendrive. Which also was possible thanks to upgrades to get a half-decent internal memory browser.
Photo backup on a computer is still really, really bad. And it is because they want it to work poorly so that they can sell you iCloud (I don't feel like a conspiracy theorist, I've done this stuff for a living and there's basically no way to reliably transfer your photos to your Mac or PC without fighting to get it right. It makes no sense without considering iCloud).

I know they act differently with different features and I wish they had a standard. I don't want to find myself using for years something they developed as unique and cool but that grew old with time and locked me out of industry standards, as it happened with stuff like Lightning and Siri.