Why can I Airdrop a large file, but wouldn’t be able to send that same file by text message or email?
In: Technology
AirDrop uses Bluetooth and WiFi in a pretty smart way. Your phone acts like a walkie talkie with Bluetooth by sending a “hello” message out to anyone nearby and will only listen back from people in your contact list (unless you specify everyone).
Then once you have figured out the person on the other end you want to send to, it creates an ad-hoc WiFi connection between you both, meaning it doesn’t require you both to be connected to the same WiFi access point; it creates its own temporary one with encryption specifically for the file transfer.
Because of this you can transfer large files due to only being restricted by the speeds of the WiFi chip on either device.
Airdrop allows your devices to talk directly to each other using Bluetooth and WiFi. This cuts out any data limits or slowness created by sending data through someone else’s much bigger, more complicated network.
The downside is that you are limited to using airdrop only when two devices are close enough to connect directly to each other without a bigger network to help.
Airdrop is a direct file transfer between two devices over WiFi or bluetooth. If you try to send the same file via email or text message, the file will have to be sent out to a server and then to the recipient. This has additional bandwidth and storage costs that will add up quickly across large numbers of users for whoever owns the email/text server.
Latest Answers