Last year, Apple finally added support for Rich Communications Services (RCS) texting to its platforms, improving stability, reliability, and security when exchanging green-bubble texts between the competing iPhone and Android ecosystems. Today, Google is announcing another small step forward in interoperability, pointing to a slightly less annoying future for friend groups or households where not everyone has an iPhone.
Google has updated Android’s Quick Share feature to support Apple’s AirDrop, which allows users of Apple devices to share files directly using a local peer-to-peer Wi-Fi connection. Apple devices with AirDrop enabled and set to “Everyone for 10 minutes” mode will appear in the Quick Share device list just like other Android phones, and Android devices that support this new Quick Share version will also appear in the AirDrop menu.
Google will, at least initially, only support the feature on the Pixel 10 series. The company is “hoping to improve the experience and expand it to more Android devices”, but it did not announce anything about a timeline or any hardware or software requirements. Quick Share also won’t work with AirDrop devices operating in the default “Contacts only” mode, although Google says “[welcomes] Opportunity to work with Apple to enable ‘Contacts Only’ mode in the future. (Read between the lines: Google and Apple are not currently working together to enable this, and Google confirmed to The Verge that Apple was not involved at all.)
Like AirDrop, Google notes that files shared through Quick Share are transferred between devices, without being sent directly to any company’s servers.
Google shared a little more information about the security of Quick Share in a separate post, crediting Android’s use of the memory-safe Rust programming language for making secure file sharing between platforms possible.
“Its compiler enforces strict ownership and borrowing rules at compile time, which guarantees memory safety,” writes Dave Kledermacher, Google vice president of platform security and privacy. “Rust removes the entire class of memory-related bugs. This means our implementation is inherently resilient against attackers attempting to use maliciously crafted data packets to exploit memory errors.”