A couple of days ago I posted a story about Pixel 10’s and ultimately all Android phones getting the ability to support Apple’s AirDrop functionality. One thing that sort of popped into my head at the time was the thought that Apple as a company was not mentioned in terms of signing off on this. As a result, I did some looking around and found my answer via a statement that Google provided to Android Authority:
We accomplished this through our own implementation. Our implementation was thoroughly vetted by our own privacy and security teams, and we also engaged a third party security firm to pentest the solution.
So Apple was not involved. That really sounds like the whole Beeper situation where Beeper reverse engineered iMessage to give Android users the ability to send and receive iMessages in a very sketchy way. As a result Apple went scorched Earth on Beeper to stop that from working. Now Bepper was a very tiny company which truly had zero chance against Apple. Google is a much bigger company that will stand up to Apple if the latter tries to break this functionality. It should also be noted that Apple gets billions of dollars from Google via an agreement to have Google’s search engine as the default search engine on iDevices. Thus Apple may have a financial incentive not to do anything. Thus the fact that Apple didn’t sign off on this as far as I can tell may be a non factor. But we’ll find out soon enough.
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This entry was posted on November 22, 2025 at 8:28 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Apple, Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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So About Android Phones Getting AirDrop…. Apple May Not Have Signed Off On This
A couple of days ago I posted a story about Pixel 10’s and ultimately all Android phones getting the ability to support Apple’s AirDrop functionality. One thing that sort of popped into my head at the time was the thought that Apple as a company was not mentioned in terms of signing off on this. As a result, I did some looking around and found my answer via a statement that Google provided to Android Authority:
We accomplished this through our own implementation. Our implementation was thoroughly vetted by our own privacy and security teams, and we also engaged a third party security firm to pentest the solution.
So Apple was not involved. That really sounds like the whole Beeper situation where Beeper reverse engineered iMessage to give Android users the ability to send and receive iMessages in a very sketchy way. As a result Apple went scorched Earth on Beeper to stop that from working. Now Bepper was a very tiny company which truly had zero chance against Apple. Google is a much bigger company that will stand up to Apple if the latter tries to break this functionality. It should also be noted that Apple gets billions of dollars from Google via an agreement to have Google’s search engine as the default search engine on iDevices. Thus Apple may have a financial incentive not to do anything. Thus the fact that Apple didn’t sign off on this as far as I can tell may be a non factor. But we’ll find out soon enough.
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This entry was posted on November 22, 2025 at 8:28 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Apple, Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.