> Under pressure from the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), Apple is being forced to ditch its proprietary peer-to-peer Wi-Fi protocol – Apple Wireless Direct Link (AWDL) – in favor of the industry-standard Wi-Fi Aware, also known as Neighbor Awareness Networking (NAN). A quietly published EU interoperability roadmap mandates Apple support Wi-Fi Aware 4.0 in iOS 19 and v5.0,1 thereafter, essentially forcing AWDL into retirement. This post investigates how we got here (from Wi-Fi Direct to AWDL to Wi-Fi Aware), what makes Wi-Fi Aware technically superior, and why this shift unlocks true cross-platform peer-to-peer connectivity for developers.

Apple cant do anything without angering EU.

People who are categorically against government intervention get weird when such an intervention shown to be An Undeniably Good Thing™. In contrast, for such people the idea that libertarianism might have Bad Consequences™ for personal liberties, or even their sacred financial system, isn't entertained.

> When we asked Google whether it developed this feature with or without Apple’s involvement, Moriconi confirmed it was not a collab. “We accomplished this through our own implementation,” he tells The Verge.

And the Google rep says otherwise:

When we asked Google whether it developed this feature with or without Apple’s involvement, Moriconi confirmed it was not a collab. “We accomplished this through our own implementation,”