I find a lot of the grief with these protocols is driven by which wifi router is in use. When using the old Apple wifi routers I never had trouble with homekit, airdrop, handoff, airplay or any of the zeroconfig network stuff: as soon as I switched to other brands the issues would pop up (including ones that oddly seem to persist even after disconnecting from wifi - but then disappear when using a different user account on the same machine).
Because of this I feel Apple could do a hugely better job in all of their wireless protocols, as it stands the only truly stable networking appears to be between two iphones.
Because of this I feel Apple could do a hugely better job in all of their wireless protocols, as it stands the only truly stable networking appears to be between two iphones.