It’s not often that a cool new gadget feature is announced that you can try out on your device right away. But that’s exactly what happened yesterday, when suddenly, Google announced that it had worked out a way to bring AirDrop interoperability to Pixel 10 phones — all without Apple’s involvement.
After the news was published, an update began to be released that enabled this feature, first coming to the 10 Pro and 10 Pro XL, which I have. And once I got past some of the initial hurdles, it’s been nothing but a joy, just airdropping left and right – iPad, MacBook, iPhone, it’s all working. It is beautiful.
Let’s hope we keep it up.
Once the news came out, I started updating everything I could on my Pixel 10 Pro in an attempt to get it to work. When that didn’t work, I had the good sense to read Mishaal Rahman’s ‘How To’ Android AuthorityWhich led me to the Play Store listing for the system app I needed to install. My first and most consequential use case: getting a photo of a receipt from a Pixel phone to my work MacBook, something I have to do at least once a month. If I’m on iOS, it’s easy – I just AirDrop it. When I’m on Android, I use work-arounds like Slacking myself, or, God forbid, putting it in Google Drive somewhere and praying I can find it on the other side. Is our national nightmare finally over?
My heart sank when my first attempt to AirDrop from Pixel to MacBook failed, but I restarted the laptop, and it’s been working without any problems since. Note to self: Consider restarting your computer more than once per fiscal quarter. I airdropped a receipt for tacos. A video of my kid dancing at the bowling alley. A screen recording of me airdropping a receipt on a computer. It all worked. Airdropping from laptop to phone also works.
Airdropping from the Pixel 10 Pro continues to work with other Apple devices, even those running developer betas or older OS versions. iPad running iPadOS 18.6.2? Works great. iPhone 17 Pro running iOS 26.1 developer beta? Works. (I know, I’m updating all these devices tonight, don’t yell at me.)
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You have to put the received Apple device in “Visible to everyone” mode for this to work, which sucks. But anything. If Google’s head of platforms and devices, Rick Osterlow, had come on stage at that Jimmy Fallon Pixel 10 launch event and said, “By the way, you can use AirDrop with the Pixel 10,” instead of talking about AI features, the crowd would have gone wild., But I guess Google either didn’t figure it out at the time or was planning this weird stealth launch on some random Thursday in November. I don’t really care what it is. I’m glad AirDrop is here for Android.
Looking ahead, there is good news and bad news. The good news is that Google says it plans to roll it out to “other devices,” which could mean other Pixel phones or — hopefully — Android phones more widely. I’m working hard for the latter. The bad news is, remember beeper-gate? When a third-party company figured out how to get iMessage on Android phones, Apple said, “Oh no,” and shut it down. It is possible that this happens here. I reached out to Apple yesterday for comment on the situation and did not receive a response. That silence is making me a little worried about the long-term feasibility of this project.
But then this also includes the European Union
But then this also includes the European Union. Ars Technica Explain that under the DMA, EU regulators forced Apple to abandon its proprietary wireless protocols for interoperable ones, which may have been how Google forced its way into AirDrop. Google isn’t specific on that point, but says in a security blog post, “This feature does not use workarounds; the connection is direct and peer-to-peer, meaning your data is never routed through a server, shared content is never logged, and no additional data is shared.” So perhaps Google is hoping that by garnering a lot of public support and publishing a report from an outside security firm that it will slap Apple on the hand when the EU finds a way to shut it down. Eventually, we got RCS on the iPhone due to EU pressure. Can’t we have AirDrop on Android as a little gift?
However it happens, I hope it sticks. It would be a shame if Apple discontinued it. Let computers work together, friends! We just want to move receipts photos around without involving a cloud server. Is that too much to ask? I guess we’ll find out. In the meantime, I’ll be dropping stuff on this Pixel phone to my heart’s content.