If you and your friends have iPhones, you might use AirDrop to send pictures and files. If you all have Androids, you might use Quick Share. But if you have a mix of both platforms, suddenly file sharing isn’t so easy. You could email the pictures, but, shoot, there’s a data limit. You could text them, but if your friend isn’t on RCS, videos are going to look horrible. You could use a cross-platform chat app, but good luck agreeing on which one to use. If only AirDrop was available on Android, and Quick Share on iOS.
In a Thursday announcement on The Keyword, Google made history: Quick Share now works with AirDrop—starting with the Pixel 10, anyway. If you or a friend has one of Google’s latest smartphones, you can start wirelessly file sharing to the other platform, as if they were a part of yours.
To that point, it does seem like file sharing between iPhone and Android—and vice versa—feels intuitive. On Android, you can open Quick Share, look at your “Send to nearby devices,” and a compatible iPhone will appear alongside any compatible Android devices. On iOS, opening AirDrop will show a compatible Pixel 10 among the list of available devices. It’s almost like the features were built this way from the beginning. (They should have been.)
The only caveat is the receiver’s iPhone needs to be set to “Everyone for 10 Minutes.” If the iPhone is set to “Contacts Only,” this feature won’t work yet. Google says it’s open to working with Apple to expand this functionality, but at the moment, you can’t leave your AirDrop open to just your contacts, if those contacts happen to be on Pixel.
It’s too bad this new cross-platform functionality is limited to the Pixel 10 series, but, hopefully, it expands to more Androids over time. While iOS and Android aren’t necessarily the easiest operating systems to work across, Apple and Google have made massive improvements in recent years. Now that iPhones support RCS, and some Androids now work with AirDrop, we’re closing the gap between these two once-polar-opposite platforms.
