It’s pretty rare when a cool new gadget feature gets announced that you can try right away on your own devices. But that’s exactly what happened yesterday when, out of the blue, Google announced it had engineered a way to bring AirDrop interoperability to Pixel 10 phones — all without Apple’s involvement.
After the news dropped, an update started rolling out that enabled the feature, arriving first for the 10 Pro and 10 Pro XL, which I have on hand. And once I got past some initial snags, it’s been nothing but a joy just AirDropping shit left and right — to iPads, MacBooks, iPhones, it’s all working. It’s beautiful.
Let’s hope we get to keep it.
Once the news broke, I set about updating everything on my Pixel 10 Pro that could be updated in an effort to get it to work. When that didn’t get it up and running, I had the good sense to read Mishaal Rahman’s how-to for Android Authority, which steered me toward a Play Store listing for the system app I needed to install. My first and most consequential use case: getting a picture of a receipt from the Pixel phone to my work MacBook, something I have to do at least once a month. If I happen to be on iOS, that’s easy — I just AirDrop it. When I’m on Android, I use a work-around like Slacking myself, or, god forbid, putting it somewhere in Google Drive and praying I can find it on the other side. Is our national nightmare finally, kind of, over?
My heart sank when my first attempts to AirDrop from the Pixel to the MacBook failed, but I restarted the laptop, and it’s been working without a problem ever since. Note to self: consider restarting your computer more than once a fiscal quarter. I AirDropped myself a receipt for tacos. A video of my kid dancing at a bowling alley. A screen recording of me AirDropping a receipt to the computer. It all worked. AirDropping from the laptop to the phone works, too.
AirDropping from the Pixel 10 Pro continues to work with other Apple devices, even those running developer betas or older OS versions. An iPad running iPadOS 18.6.2? Works fine. An iPhone 17 Pro running iOS 26.1 developer beta? Works. (I know, I’m updating all of these devices tonight, don’t yell at me.)
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You have to put the receiving Apple device into a “visible to all” mode for it to work, which kinda sucks. But whatever. If Google’s head of platforms and devices, Rick Osterloh, had gotten onstage 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 a bunch of AI features, the crowd would have gone wild. But I guess Google either hadn’t figured it out at that point or was planning on this weird stealth launch on a random Thursday in November. I don’t really care which it is. I’m just glad AirDrop for Android is here.
Looking ahead, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that Google says it plans to roll this out to “other devices,” which could mean other Pixel phones or — hopefully — Android phones more broadly. I’m rooting hard for the latter. The bad news is, well, remember Beeper-gate? When a third-party company figured out how to get iMessage onto Android phones, Apple said, “Oh hell no,” and shut it down. It’s possible that it happens here. I reached out to Apple yesterday for a comment on the situation and I haven’t heard back. That silence is making me a little worried about this project’s long-term feasibility.
But then there’s the European Union of it all
But then there’s the European Union of it all. Ars Technica points out that under the DMA, EU Regulators forced Apple to ditch its proprietary wireless protocol for one that’s interoperable, which may be how Google engineered its way into AirDrop. Google isn’t specific on that point, but says in a security blog post, “This feature does not use a workaround; the connection is direct and peer-to-peer, meaning your data is never routed through a server, shared content is never logged, and no extra data is shared.” So maybe Google is hoping that by drumming up a lot of public support and publishing a report from an outside security firm that the EU will slap Apple’s hand when it finds a way to shut this down. After all, we got RCS on the iPhone thanks to EU pressure. Can’t we have AirDrop on Android, as a little treat?
However it happens, I hope this sticks. It will be a massive shame if Apple shuts this down. Let the computers work together, guys! We just want to move pictures of receipts around without getting a cloud server involved. Is that too much to ask? We’ll find out, I guess. In the meantime, I’ll be AirDropping stuff from this Pixel phone to my heart’s content.
