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It’s very rare that a great new gadget feature is announced that you can try right away on your own devices. But that’s exactly what happened yesterday when, suddenly, Google announced It’s designed a way to bring AirDrop interoperability to the Pixel 10 phones — all without Apple’s involvement.
After the news broke, an update that enabled the feature began rolling out, arriving first on the 10 Pro and 10 Pro XL, which I have on hand. Once I got past some of the initial hurdles, it was nothing but fun, just AirDropping left and right – for iPads, MacBooks and iPhones, it all works. It’s beautiful.
Let’s hope we can keep it.
As soon as the news came out, I set about updating everything on my Pixel 10 Pro that could be updated to try to get it to work. When that didn’t work, I had the good sense to read How to make Mashal Rahman Robot bodywhich led me towards the Play Store listing for System application that I need to install. My first and most important use case: getting a photo of a receipt from my Pixel phone to my work MacBook, something I have to do at least once a month. If I’m on iOS, this is easy – I just use AirDrop. When I use Android, I use a workaround like Slacking myself, or, heaven forbid, I put it somewhere in Google Drive and pray I find it on the other side. Is our national nightmare finally over?
My heart sank when my first attempt to use AirDrop from a Pixel to a MacBook failed, but I rebooted the laptop, and it’s been working without issue ever since. Note to self: Consider restarting your computer more than once during the quarter. I dropped off the taco receipt myself. A video of my child dancing in the bowling alley. Record the screen of my AirDropping receipt to your computer. Everything works. AirDropping from laptop to phone works too.
AirDropping of the Pixel 10 Pro continues to work with other Apple devices, even those using developer betas or older versions of the operating system. An iPad running iPadOS 18.6.2? It works fine. iPhone 17 Pro running iOS 26.1 developer beta? He works. (I know I’m going to be updating all of these tonight, so don’t yell at me.)
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You have to put the receiving Apple device in “Visible to All” mode for it to work, which kind of sucks. But whatever. If Rick Osterloh, Google’s head of platforms and devices, had gotten on stage at Jimmy Fallon’s Pixel 10 launch event and said, “By the way, you can use AirDrop with the Pixel 10,” instead of talking about a host of AI features, the crowd would have exploded.. But I think Google either didn’t figure it out at that point or was planning this weird stealth launch on a random Thursday in November. I don’t really care what it is. I’m glad AirDrop for Android is here.
Looking to the future, there is 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 the whistle gate? When a third-party company figured out how to get iMessage on Android phones, Apple said, “Oh no, no.” Close it. It could happen here. I reached out to Apple yesterday for comment on the situation and received no response. This silence makes me a little concerned about the long-term viability of this project.
But then there’s the EU of everything
But then there’s the EU of everything. Ars Technica Pointing Under the DMA, EU regulators forced Apple to ditch its own wireless protocol and replace it with an interoperable one, which may be how Google engineered its path to AirDrop. Google isn’t specific on this 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 the 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, the EU will slap Apple’s hand when it finds a way to shut this down. After all, We got RCS on iPhone Thanks to pressure from the European Union. Can’t we get AirDrop on Android as a little bonus?
However it happens, I hope this continues. It would be a huge shame if Apple shut this down. Let the computers work together, guys! We just want to transfer images of receipts without involving a cloud server. Is that too much to ask? We’ll find out, I guess. In the meantime, I’ll move things from this Pixel to my heart’s content.
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