airdrop between iOS 8 & Yosemite

Just another "prerequisite" on a mid-2012 Mac: it also seems necessary that a receiving folder for bluetooth incomings should be defined on the Mac: Mac Setting -> Shared Access (or however it is called in English) -> Bluetooth shared access

It seems to me that the only sensible thing to do is take my late 2013 rMBP and my iPhone 6+ to the Apple store, hand them to one of the geniuses and say "You claim it just works, so make it happen, genius".

If enough people do that the people who work in the stores will riot and Apple will be forced to fix it. It's amazing to see so many people wasting so much time in an effort to make Apple live up to their claims.

UPDATE: As soon as I posted this, I got a successful AirDrop. Hmmmm....

Having the same problem with my MBP mid 2012 and iPhone 6 plus. I can see the phone from Mac, but I can not see the Mac on the iPhone for Airdrop e.g. in Photo app.

Now I added a 3rd device an iPhone 5c, all with the same iCloud account. Now when I want to share a picture from iPhone5c, I can finally see the Mac on the iPhone 6 plus too. When I disable the 5c, the Mac is still visible in the Airdrop part in Photo App on the 6 plus. Very strange, both devices are on iOS 8.2 and Mac on 10.10.2. So it is a discovery issue which gets solved when adding the iPhone 5c. But I can only send from iPhone 6plus to the Mac, when the iPhone5c is on. I don't understand this anymore.

It turns out my problem has to do with my dual band Wi-Fi access point. AirDrop only works when both devices are on the same network, and I found that the Mac was on the 802.11ac channel band while the iPhone was on 802.11n. When I forced the iPhone to forget 802.11n, it roamed onto 802.11ac and AirDrop worked.

There are also potential issues with firewalls; the Apple firewall works better than Norton, although it can be annoying.

So Apple, we merely need to be aware of which band all our devices are operating on, and then switch to the lowest common denominator to make everything work?

Can't wait to see the Apple Watch not connect over WiFi for the same reason.

Normally, no, you wouldn't need to know what band you're operating on.

But if you do have your wireless router set up in some odd setup where it is broadcasting two separate networks, and devices are on different networks, then yes that would be a problem.

How can Apple control if you do something that physically puts the devices on separate networks? That's not under their control.

Use an Airport or a Time Capsule and don't have a separate 5 GHz network name, and this won't be a problem.

Apple could route AirDrop requests at the IP level instead of using Wi-Fi direct connect. I like to name my 11n and 11ac networks with different SSIDs to I know what band I'm using, a fairly normal practice. All my devices are on the same IP subnet, so a subnet broadcast followed by a UDP transfer would work fine.

Apple isn't too swift at networking.

It's not a "fairly normal practice." I'd assume fewer than 0.1% of people will do that to their network.

And if you do, you should be smart enough to figure out why things that expect to be on the same network can't talk to one another 😝

OK, even though I was one of the people who invented Wi-Fi in the early 90s and then contributed the frame aggregation technique that doubled throughput for 11n, I know nothing about Wi-Fi.

Thanks for clearing that up.

Look. You're the one that kept saying that Airdrop didn't work, when IN FACT the problem was that the machines couldn't see each other because they were on different networks. And they were on different networks because you configured them that way.

You can talk all day about how you helped invent Wi-Fi, but the fact is, that even you couldn't put together cause and effect when some specific configuration decisions that you yourself made caused the problem.

I also believe that AirDrop itself uses Wi-Fi direct for the communications (i.e. the traffic itself is P2P and doesn't go through the AP), but it may be that an AP is necessary for initial discovery in some way.

Same problem here!

I so tired to have new features from Apple that never work properly at the end! It happens to me all the time!

Personally I have an iphone just cause my macbook, but you have to admit that sharing things in android is the easiest thing ever!

That said, hope somebody found a solution...

They need to fire the idiot who implemented this feature

And find a competent person to replace him/her

I just tried to send a video from my wife's iPhone 5S to my Macbook Pro 13 Retina (2013). It didn't work. The iPhone doesn't see my Mac and my Mac doesn't see the iPhone. Tried it all. Crap... :-(

Yes and how do we get Apple to pay attention to the request, nay, demand by customers to FIX THIS FEATURE! We want it...they need to find a way to give it to us! C'mon Apple - iPhone team...do it this year PLEASE!

Hi All,

I was facing a similar issue and after speaking to Apple Tech team, have managed to fix it. Let me list down briefly what was the problem area and the steps required to fix it.

Problem: Can see my iPhone 6 (ios 8.4.1) on my MacBook Pro (mid 2012), Yosomite OS in AirDrop but not able to detect my MacBook on my Iphone6. From Mac to Iphone transfer are happening but since Mac is not visible on Iphone 6 so not able to use airdrop on phone to send anything back on macbook pro.

I checked on various forums but couldn't find a concrete reply. So I contacted the Apple Tech Team and they solved my problem on the call. The solution is given below. Hope it would be useful for those who are facing similar issues. If not, will suggest calling Apple Tech team in your region and getting them to solve the problem.

Solution:

Prerequisites: Both your devices should be on same wifi network. Also keep bluetooth on both devices (not necessarily to be paired)

1) Go to your Iphone settings.

2) Click the wifi option

3) on your selected wifi, click the blue exclamation icon

4) In the DNS settings - change the DNS to 8.8.8.88.8.::4 (before doing that, copy or write your old DNS somewhere)

5) Go back and exit your settings area

6) Now check your airdrop again

7) Go to any gallery section and select the file to be transferred. You will not see your macbook Pro in your airdrop list 🙂

I have attached the screenshots of my iphone 6 settings page and the result page post successful detection below. Hope these will be useful for you guys.

Cheers!

Lokesh