Imagine these scenarios:
* You sit in some pub with a few friends. You show them a video you filmed yesterday on your phone. You're speakers are really bad, and you want to send it to a friend who has better speakers.
--> You try to send the video over What's App. You discover you have no cell reception. You give up.
* You are at a conference, about to give a talk. For some reason, your MacBook won't work with the projector. You want to copy the presentation to some other laptop. The WiFi is overloaded.
--> You spend 5 minutes finding someone who still carries a USB stick and transfer the files.
* You are in an airplane, and you have a bunch of company documents stored on your laptop, which you want to read on your tablet. You forgot your micro USB cable.
--> You are angry at yourself for not installing a file sharing app and for forgetting to send yourself the documents with GMail and downloading them on the tablet.
Everytime I run into one of those situations, I just get angry that there is no easy solution, and most of the time we have to resort to some clutch, like relying on a centralized service like email or messenger apps.
How do we still have this problem in 2016, where we all carry multiple supposedly inter-connected and interoperable devices?
There is an endless amount of file sharing apps for iOS and Android. There are countless protocols and options for discovering devices and sharing files (including "ancient" options like Samba, NFS and FTP).
Why is there no universally accepted standard that facilitates device discovery and file sharing between devices over WiFi AND Bluetooth, with implementations installed by default on every device?
Am I alone in seeing a need here?
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.