Posted by stusmall 3/28/2025
Haven't looked in 2-3 years, but found so little ehm last I looked. Very dismaying. So many folks doing "p2p" file sharing apps, but generally they assume you have setup networking already. We really need to own the means of connectivity. Especially now!
That means you couldn't do it with off the shelf WiFi hardware.
You might be able to do it whilst dropping existing WiFi connections during the transfer.
https://github.com/seemoo-lab/owl
It currently drops connections to an AP, but the authors of the implementation seem to believe this could be fixed:
> OWL does not allow a concurrent connection to an AP. This means, that when started, the Wi-Fi interface exclusively uses AWDL. To work around this, OWL could create a new monitor interface (instead of making the Wi-Fi interface one) and adjust its channel sequence to include the channel of the AP network.
Ideally the second wifi adapter could be USB based! For years usb cards were very second tier; I haven't tried again lately but I assume that's still largely the case.
Given that there are some pretty affordable (below $70) barebones thunderbolt docks for GPUs, it'd be neat to see some thunderbolt docks designed for one or multiple wifi cards (or other m.2).
There's a single kernel commit referencing Wi-Fi Aware from 2023 [0]. iw supposedly supports a few commands pertaining to it [1].
[0] https://web.git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?h=v6.14&id=9b89495e479c5fedbf3f2eca4f1c4e9dd481265e
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53594406/implementing-a-wifi-aware-application-outside-androidWhat, the same people that named a consumer facing product 802.11g?
For example Intel's broken Location Aware Regulatory completely breaks any use-cases where your device is not the STA (on anything besides 2.4GHz). Most cards also have no DFS support, meaning you'll be left with a microscopic usable segment. Then there's also the problem with incorrect regulatory information.
All of which in the end makes reliable high-speed point-to-point operation very annoying to achieve. Even if it'd be totally legal. Leaving you with a terribly slow link.
"Fire up adhoc, set it to this ssid, vnc to this address"
Two minutes later, my photos are on five screens around the coffee shop and everyone can see.
Adhoc just worked, and that's more than I can say for a great many things before or since.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Ad-hoc_networking#Manual_me...
people hail apple for what is essentially 3 line script XD
i do understand that it does much more. but 3 line script is closer to what it really is, then what people think it is.
Can anyone familiar with the topic chime in what it would take to utilize WiFi Aware in let's say a Raspberry Pi (maybe using a different wireless chip connected via usb)? Maybe even to connect to Android smartphones
However, we decided to try it on a recent flight, and it turns out it still requires an internet connection, both to satisfy Steam, and to connect to some sort of LAN coordination server. I ended up paying $20 for in-flight wifi.
We've lost a lot in the last 30 years, but tech like wifi aware might help bring back local-first networking. I choose to believe that if solid APIs exist, developers will use them.
this is actually kind of a hard UI/UX problem for game developers
many p2p+local auto recovery protocols are very bothersome, partially due to some of the protocols being bad or incomplete and a lot due to all kind of hardware & OSs partially or fully crippling them
so game devs often have to fall back to a coordinator server to provide reliable and easy to use functionality for most which also happens to often be the easiest thing to implement and maintain, and then in addition they could also implement work-arounds for the no-internet case
but that is additional cost for a overall niche use case (local co-op without internet), so it ends up in the backlog with low priority at best or gets outright killed. To make that worse steam provides tools to make it much easier to implement co-op (focused on non local co-op), and the easiest way to use them is in a way which always requires internet even for local co-op
so as long as steam doesn't put in a lot of work to make no-internet local co-op close to free to implement for most games it will never happen for most games
- depending on device and application type you not even being able to send broadcast/the OS silently dropping them
- firewall blocking incoming TCP/UDP without hole punching
- p2p in games having security implications (unsafe network stacks, game engine etc. allowing RCEs and similar) so you want to make sure only "more trusted" communication can happen, so TLS is needed, but without actually fully secure p2p TLS is not easy, mainly there are issues with establishing trust (you either have to involve some side channel (i.e. a pin, QR code or similar) or pre-established trust.
The biggest thing is still that as a steam game you have a reliably, proven, easy to use "solution" as part of your normal steam integration which you anyway want to use to be able to use the friend invite system which has the drawback of needing internet for local coop which is niche use-case likely not selling any games. Why would a company implement an additional solution and handle all the UX issues of switching between them?
Whats stopping Apple from doing both?
basically the mandate requires them to not hamper WI-FI Aware in anyway which pushes developers into using AWDL instead, i.e. they require it to be as good +- some technical differences in features not so relevant for 3rd party use cases
and if you provide something which works as good why should they keep AWDL around, it's just double the dev cost and AWDL is getting older and Wi-Fi Aware is getting nice WiFi7 improvements soon
so as long as they don't have some use case outside of what Wi-Fi Aware is supposed to do which happens to work with AWDL they keeping both around long term is not a very good decision economically
How will that work out?
P2P proximal wireless transfer, sure, but there's half a dozen apps on your phone that'll let you punt a document, a photo, an invite to someone on the other phone OS platform.
Maybe I'm an edge case, but probably 90% of my Airdrop usage is between my own devices, so the platform taking care of the authentication story is of more utility than cross-platform transfers. If someone isn't on iOS I'll just send them the file on Signal since, if the source is my phone in the first place, it's probably not a huge transfer anyway.
That's exactly my point: Apps – which users have to install, which requires an Internet connection.
Also all of them routing data through some centralized server, often not end-to-end encrypted.
> If someone isn't on iOS I'll just send them the file on Signal
Approximately none of the people that I've Airdropped photos to in the past have Signal installed, and even if they do, there isn't always an Internet connection available. Airdrop also sends the original photo including all metadata and resolution, which is another big reason I like it.
On top of that, I've Airdropped photos to complete strangers (e.g. if I managed to get a nice shot of something on a tour) with which I didn't have any desire to exchange numbers, and I just would not have been able to send the photo to Android.
Comments like this are one of the few things that can make me jealous of Apple users. I just can't stomach how locked down the platform is as a developer. Android is also getting worse though.
This also roundtrips to the internet, which is slow and expensive compared to a LAN transfer.
You also can't attach files >100MB in Signal. No transferring an installer .iso.
Yeah, via their server, which means it's slow even if you have wifi, requires valuable data credit if not, or it requires the installation of a companion app on the other device and putting the other device in the same network.
Compared to a decade ago or two, there are too many silos in communication these days as it is.
Would be cool if an open standard on auth forms on top of this.
Note that this is only a conversation about sender identification, which allows sending to a "non-world-visible" receiving device and confirmation-less sending to devices with the same iCloud account on them. Anonymous sending isn't cryptographically gated by Apple, to my knowledge.
It might be possible to reimplement the required Apple API, but as demonstrated by the iMessage/Beeper saga, they usually shut such things down pretty quickly.
If they're excited about this, I'm excited about this.
[1] What is DECT-2020 New Radio (NR), and how big a deal is it? (2021)
I don't think this is true. In the early 2000s, in Germany, the alternative, now vastly used "infrastructure mode" was rare because Wi-Fi basestations were rare and expensive, e.g. DSL modems didn't have built-in Wi-Fi.
So the only way of wirelessly sharing internet at home / files with friends at university (which also didn't have Wi-Fi yet) was with ad-hoc mode.