Airdrop is flaky

I can't get Air Drop to work at all. It doesn't see any other device. This is on Mac Mini, Air, iPAD, or iPhone. This is something that does "just work"

I think this may be a fairly common but intermittent problem. I have spent three days with Apple support on this. Finally, I got connected and felt really good: an hour later it isn't working again. At this point I am going to go through every combination of settings (and the order they are applied), to see if that is the problem. If not, then there may be some unrecognized problem that randomly affects Airdrop.

it is because it is too new to be perfect yet, so basically it is a publically released thing that shouldv'e been a beta project.

owen.nik wrote:

it is because it is too new to be perfect yet, so basically it is a publically released thing that shouldv'e been a beta project.

A little late perhaps?

Same for me. AirDrop has always been flaky in my experience, sometimes working, sometimes not; it usually recognises the other device, sometimes with a delay, but then invariably once you tap on the others evict to initiate a transfer, it sits there waiting for a response indefinitely, with nothing on the other device Indicating an initiated transfer. Something goes wrong in the on handshake it seemms; I have read nothing about ports that need to be opened on my router, and it does work intermittently, brilliantly when it does, so it isn't blocked.

usually I will give it a go to see if it has been fixed in an update, I let it sit for a short while, I may cancel the transfer and try once more, then just open up Photosync on both devices, at least it works reliably every time. For now, as I am still on 10.9 on my Mac, I either use Dropbox or Photosync transferring between I-device and Mac. Occasionally Transmit, a great app. But it is less visual, you just have a list of files and destinations.

So basically, I don't let it get to me, I try it, and move on to something that works if it fails. It should "just work", but doesn't just yet, sadly. I can't rely on Photosync or iCloud Photos just yet either.

To call Air Drop "flaky" has to be the biggest understatment I have ever heard! While I haven't kept a record, I'd hazard a guess that, if I'm succesful at getting my devices to even recognize each other (a miracle in itself), I am only able to succesfully transfer a file maybe 1 in 10 tries. That's considerably less than pure chance! So why do I keep trying it you might ask? Well, if it worked reliably it would be SO much easier than any other method for copying files from one device to the other that I guess the optimist in me just kicks in every once in a while (plus a certain morbid curiosity to see if Apple has deigned to fix this, though after over a year of reported problems that's looking less and less likely)

I guess Dropbox (or your third party cloud drive of choice) is still the best game in town.