alt Hacker News> which makes the value proposition a lot less clear.
Wirelessly transferring files between a phone and a computer seems like a big use case. Still no easy standard way of doing it.
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But that doesn't need new peripherals, I could do that in my home WLAN network if they'd just install standard software for it on the phone (which you can fix by installing it from F-Droid etc.)
Bluetooth FTP was widely supported until ~2009. All Nokia phones and many flip phones had it. iPhone did not, AOSP technically did, but carrier phones often had it disabled, and it slowly disappeared.
Windows 11 still supports it, I think macOS too. Pairing is technically optional.
This is an UX problem, not a technical problem. You could easily use Wifi to transfer files between devices quite fast, there's just no agreed upon open protocol for it. Afaik that's how AirDrop works.
There's no formal standard, but I keep seeing this complaint from people who just haven't installed syncthing. At this point it's not inexistence but mere ignorance
Airdrop works. Ok, it's platform bound, but I'm sure it could be ported.
It's not such a big thing, though. I hardly use it, and young people don't seem to use it either. The stuff on their phone and laptop seem separate worlds, just like mine are. Might be because they don't know about it, though.
Imo cloud storage like Dropbox has 95% solved this use case for years, which is why alternative solutions haven't popped up.
There are websites using WebRTC for p2p transfer.
I assume this is the same "problem". Most people (not the HN cohort) don't want to transfer "files", the abstraction of the file is either outdated for them or maybe even unnatural / unknown (younger generation).
They might want to transfer (a better word: share) photos/videos, documents, etc. And for those they use specific apps and "the cloud". No "files" (for the sake of files), and barely any hierarchy of (folders etc).
As long as the entity they want to share magically shows up on the another device or at the other person they want to share with, they are happy. They just skip two levels of abstraction ("this photo is a FILE and I will use USB to transfer it"). Maybe a far fetched analogy but this is why most of the drivers of an automatic don't really think about clutches and how the torque of the engine's output is converted.
At least this is my perception (outside the IT bubble)