The AirDrop News Android Users Have Waited For Is Finally Here
Speaking to Android Authority, Google's Vice President of Engineering for the Android platform, Eric Kay stated that, "Last year, we launched AirDrop interoperability. In 2026, we're going to be expanding it to a lot more devices. We spent a lot of time and energy to make sure that we could build something that was compatible not only with iPhone but iPads and MacBooks. Now that we've proven it out, we're working with our partners to expand it into the rest of the ecosystem, and you should see some exciting announcements come very soon." While a solid list of which devices and partners has yet to be disclosed this does confirm that Google plans to offer the feature a wider range of Android-based smartphones.
While it's unclear how many older devices (if any) will receive the functionality, it does help provide some important feature parity and "cross-play" with iOS and Mac OS devices. AirDrop has been a feature for so long that it's well-known, even among non-Apple users, so Android users finally being able to participate via Quick Share is a welcome deveopment.
Per the Android Authority coverage, Nothing and Qualcomm have both confirmed plans to bring Quick Drop-to-AirDrop functionality to their devices. Eric Kay also stated that Google will be "Working to make it easy for people who do decide to switch (to Android froom iPhone) to transfer their data and make sure they've got everything they had from their old phone. So there's a lot more going on with that." With Google and Apple working together to make switching between platforms more seamless, the days of mobile users feeling locked in to their respective ecosystems may soon change.
