Apple was traditonally better at this sort of thing ("just works"), but a) it doesn't actually "just work", because their software quality is not up to par, and b) the lack of interoperability means this is only useful if you live in an Apple-only world.

In general, I'd say it will stay like this. Unfortunately.

Other similar examples: E-mail (yes, SMTP and E-mail clients, it all sucks badly, and we can't agree on how to improve it) and instant messaging.

It's one of those things that seems simple (move 1 file 2 inches) but is really complex, with a lot of possible mechanisms, protocols, OSes, devices, and edge cases.

When the Dropbox people were looking for money, VCs would say, "But there are already plenty of ways to keep files in sync." They'd say, "Do you use any of them regularly?" The answer was always no. There was a giant gap that nobody had filled.

And they started with an easier problem, which is one person with multiple devices who wants one folder to be in two places. No features, just a folder that's always the same. (And they started with just desktop OSes.) Transferring files seamlessly between devices owned by different people on demand is much harder. Especially given how mobile OSes have deemphasized the notion of "file" altogether.

So yes, I don't expect a solution either.

This to me hits on the real problem. Filesharing is easy when all files are strings of ones and zeros, to be freely interpreted by programs and stored in a generic filesystem. When your operating system treats files as atomic things that can only be managed by a specific program baked into the OS, filesharing becomes much more difficult.

This is a classic Apple dark pattern that spread to the rest of the industry and is now a poison that can't be easily purged.

Technically, you have a generic filesystem, and individual programs can load files from that, there's no direct relationship between the files and programs. But in the mind of a typical non-tech user, files are something that belong to a program.

However, these companies have financial incentives to do the opposite: they want users to do everything within tightly controlled platforms like Google Drive and iCloud, and they want to avoid commoditization at all costs. The last thing these companies want is for users to be able easily to transfer all their videos, music, photos, work files, contacts, calendar data, bookmarks, etc. from one platform to another.

The behavior of these companies is analogous to the behavor of AT&T at the beginning of the 20th century. AT&T had the largest telephone network with the most users, and smaller independent phone companies wanted to interconnect with it, but AT&T refused to do so, causing users to leave the smaller networks for AT&T's. Users of the smaller networks were unable to connect with users of the largest network. It wasn't until after the US federal government challenged AT&T for monopolistic behavior that this changed. In 1913, AT&T settled with the government in the "Kingsbury Committment," which required AT&T to allow non-competing independent telephone companies to interconnect with the AT&T network.[1]

I suspect the only way we can get easy and cross-platform data portability (local and otherwise) is via government intervention -- that is, if the government forces companies to do it for society's benefit (for example, by legally requiring compatibility with open data-sharing and app-interconnection standards), at the expense of user lock-in and corporate profits.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsbury_Commitment

My hope is that the propellerheads in those companies are able to figure out a way to sneak this killer feature past their respective marketing people.

For example, if you live in the US, you are legally required by the government to drive on the right side of the road (to avoid the chaos of the past, when each US city and state had different driving rules), and you are also legally required to buy car insurance (to make sure irresponsible drivers who cause more accidents don't get a free ride from responsible drivers). I think most people would agree these are reasonable government solutions that are not too intrusive.

Perhaps it might be possible to come up with reasonable "rules of the road" that are not too intrusive and which the government can enforce so all of us -- all of society -- can easily share data between applications and platforms?

It seems however they should however be balanced by a powerful population.

Unfortunately I don't think they will. After Apple weaseled out of open sourcing Facetime and with Microsoft running their own cloud I won't bet much on it.

Because every vendor and their dog wants to push their own proprietary toy solution to lock in users, instead of using any of the existing standards.

--> You spend 5 minutes finding someone who still carries a USB stick and transfer the files.

I still do, and perhaps 5-10 years ago, when file sharing as a whole was more... healthy, almost everyone did. MP3 players (except Apple's) also doubled as convenient portable USB mass storage devices. Before that, floppies and null modem cables (remember those?) were pretty popular.

I think the marketing term is "WiFi Direct". But good luck getting Apple and Samsung devices to both discover and associate with each other.

If it feels like you're continually being corralled into sharing files with the person next to you via a third party's servers and an open, insecure, untrusted network ("the internet"), then maybe you are.

It is not necessary to use the internet and third parties to do something as simple as transfer files to the person sitting next to you (without using removable media), but it's easy for companies to convince users that this is the only way to do it.

And in most cases no convincing is even necessary because users fail to consider the alternatives.

personally i can report a C+ experience usually. generally functional, maybe even reliable for a brief while, but buggy as hell throughout.

Windows Mobile < 8? Nope iOS? Nope

But once again, the real problem here is that Airdrop is apple-specific. We still have the same fundamental problem that despite having many direct file sharing choices, there is no common way across all the OS/hardware platforms.

didn't even try to use Bluetooth for ages, because every time it results in nightmares.

( and yes: Bluetooth was activated and connected )

Can gladly provide you the link to consulting companies that sell such reports.

And plenty of people have to use their company Windows phone.

https://xkcd.com/949/

Once Android is supported, this might actually become the universal way to share stuff.

Thanks!

Before that, the best thing for file sharing was Bump, which was kind of hacky, and required internet as a result, but did work. Sadly, Bump is no more.

As for sharing files with yourself, my answer is typically SFTP, which is excellent, provided it does what you want. It also works well for transferring files at conferences, providing your slides aren't to big to make the roundtrip in good time. A bit hacky, yes, but it works.

That's not a trivial ask. Security experts might wonder, "Wait, what new entry point are you mandating on my devices? To solve which problem?"

They'd caution that several subsets of this problem are already solved, lowering its urgency. You own both devices and have wifi? Dropbox. You have internet access? Email or other messaging services / file lockers. Both devices are the same ecosystem? Bluetooth / AirDrop / WifiDirect / Beam. You are near a gas station or in a house with a junk drawer? $1 USB stick. You didn't forget your cable? Cable. You are both developers? You may already have some arcane solution, depending on the platforms...

So, while it'd be nice to ensure two unacquainted technophobes who meet in the woods have the ability to move some file from one's mp3 player to the other's digital camera, despite never having installed any software or brought any drives or cables to help, we're slicing off thinner and thinner portions of salami here.

Also consider other approaches. More ubiquitous (functioning) internet solves all of the above, along with several other problems.

Absent that, foresight would have prevented a few of the test cases. Foresight isn't trivial, I know, but that opens up other approaches. Like maybe an alarm on a device that rings if the device gets too far away from some other little chip, which you can stick on a cable you want to never forget. A shim to friend and create a temporary shared Dropbox directory with strangers nearby would require advanced installation, but might be useful.

I don't mean to diminish the frustration of these situations. If you were talking about developing some software to help local area sharing, I'd say go for it. But putting the bar at mandatory interconnection in all devices... it's a high bar. The mere fact that legacy devices exist makes it impossible to meet those constraints.

If you relax your constraints just a little, though, I suspect a few opportunities for interesting work open up.

Then Apple killed Bluetooth by never supporting it well on the iPhone, and then implemented their proprietary AirDrop (which is actually LESS reliable for me, between Apple devices(!), than Bluetooth OPP was)

[It] synchronizes files across your/your team's computers. It's much better than uploading or email, because it's automatic, integrated into Windows, and fits into the way you already work. There's also a web interface, and the files are securely backed up to Amazon S3. [It] is kind of like taking the best elements of subversion, trac and rsync and making them "just work" for the average individual or team. Hackers have access to these tools, but normal people don't.

The problem has been attacked many times, but only centralized subscription services and hardware vendor walled gardens have succeeded as businesses.

[https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/27532820/app.html]

That is the problem right there. It shouldn't be a business. It should be a standard for all devices e.g keyboard and mice work out of the box everywhere.

There was an open source file system aiming for just that, including internet-based storage named 'opfs' or something but I can't find it anywhere now.

Open source is the only way this could be fixed, and unfortunately that is mostly the kingdom of developers who already think this is a solved problem via ssh, virtual networks, etc. Developers tend not to care about end user problems unless... well... there is a business in it!

1). Agree with many that Bluetooth (or another open protocol) is really the way to solve, but the incentives are low to implement universally as the common operating systems in our devices have shifted dramatically in the last 10 years.

2) remember the brief peer-to-peer revolution? Bit torrent, kazaa and emule were (are) pretty effective but have a bad reputation from being used for file piracy.

3). Because of #2, it's been safer for businesses to conform to the SaaS models / garden walls. (Monetizing them is also better understood)

Maybe we should push a standard for local file-sharing so that all vendors will implement it in their mobile operating systems.

The problem I think is NAT, witch makes everything much harder. But it also works as a basic firewall ... I remember the age when you used to connect your PC directly to the Internet, and if you didn't have the latest patches you would get the sasser virus within seconds. It would be scary running even Linux not behind a firewall. And many devices (smart-TV's etc) now a days expect a LAN and will be completely open.

Raise your hand if you would be OK with exposing your whole LAN to the Internet.

Whatever you do, do not use e-mail to send files! Your e-mail will go though many servers on the way, and will take up server disk space. And the data will be encoded to base64 witch will make them about 30% larger. Small files <20 Mb will be fine, but don't send Gigabytes!

the problem with this (even though the basic capabilities are there!!!) is that netcat isn't super user-friendly so people don't use it. And it's not possible to do easily on a mobile device.

So why hasn't someone built a widely-used user-friendly application that lets you send files over local networks using TCP? I don't know. I don't think it's because it's too technically challenging though.

So I taka a photo via iOS, connect to Wifi so Dropbox uploads the photo, open the file on my laptop, highlight and tag the feature, and put it on Slack. It's way better than a USB cable but there's so much more technology involved in the chain.

I think for me it's difficult to imagine a better solution though. So what's the ideal experience? Does it fit into the existing computing paradigm or no?

Or, WiFi direct https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_Direct for larger files.

Now there's a problem with discoverabillity and compatibility - but that's no different to trying to get CIFS devices talking to each other.

Disclaimer: I used to work for mimik.

They have a tiny loop, but I prefer to always keep it plugged in to my laptop.

Always works.

Except with smartphones.