AirDrop increased its speed with iOS 15 enormously, at least in my particular uses. I can’t find the reason on any official website, as Apple didn’t announce any news in this regard during WWDC 2021. But the truth is that the transmission of links, documents and other data between devices has become almost instant.
AirDrop in iOS 15 is much faster
As the weeks went by and my iOS 15 experience stabilized after the initial excitement, the details started to emerge. One day, when sharing multiple links From the iPhone 12 Pro Max with iOS 15 beta 1 to my iMac with the latest public release from Big Sur, I realized how fast they were streaming. It was something I had been using for several days, but hadn’t taken the time to think about it.
It works this way: you have the link to share ready in Safari or any other app, click share with AirDrop, choose the Mac and boom! You’ve already opened it in iMac Safari. Without waiting, without the system thinking about it.
In the past, this same action required me to hold the iPhone there, doing nothing, for a good handful of seconds. It was not a drama, but reduce both the transmission of a single link It’s a great achievement. In my other non-scientific tests, I streamed a 185MB video from the iPhone to the iMac. The transmission was completed in just 14 seconds.
I realized that the real change could be in the “hook” between the two teams. When before that took that bunch of precious seconds, now the connection is almost instantaneous. The data transmission will take the necessary time depending on the size of the file to be transmitted. But that first contact was drastically reduced.
The caution of a beta
Our partner Julius Caesar speculates it is because Apple has changed the communication network. Instead of a conventional Wi-Fi network, I would now use Wi-Fi Direct protocol
Of course, it should not be taken for granted. We are facing an iOS 15 beta, yes, a fairly stable first beta in our experience. Even if errors are to be expected And the end product may vary, that super-fast AirDrop speed can be a mirage.
We can look at Private Relay and doubts about its speed to take this improvement with caution. Even if we are faced with a much simpler function which only involves local devices. There’s a much better chance that this will be the end result that we see in September.
we hope this speed is maintained in subsequent beta releases, arriving intact in the fall. And that we also see it when streaming things with AirDrop from the rest of Apple devices.
