I'll be happy when Airdrop works reliably on Apple equipment.

It can't reliably work between two adjacent rooms in my home without arm-waving.

A hundred or thousand mile trip through iCloud works tons better.

So they forced Apple to drop an Apple proprietary thing in favor of… a Wi-Fi standard Apple helped develop specifically to replace their proprietary thing.

Not quite as strong as the headline makes the case sound.

I wonder if it's related to Apple's change from AWDL to Wi-Fi Aware, but AirDrop seems much more reliable on iOS 26. I can send to multiple people at once and they often all succeed, but most importantly, if one transfer fails or is cancelled, I can retry and it works. In older versions of iOS, a failed transfer seemed to block all future attempts until the phone was restarted.