Comment

Comment by jauntywundrkind

> with nearby devices over your local network

Still hoping for some alternatives that can do ad-hoc communication, without any network infrastructure.

Wifi got a bunch of ambient discovery capabilities a bit back that seems exactly targeted to this stuff. Neighbor Awareness Networking, or WiFi Aware for the trademarked industry packaging there-of. It was built into Android 8. There's also even older wifi-p2p/wifi direct (again, spec vs industry branding for the same thing).

I haven't looked in a bit, but I'd love to see a Linux based toolkit around this, that interops with Android, but isn't so handcuffed down by Google.

Google - like Apple - has some ultra proprietary tied-to-your account peer-to-peer stuff. There's Nearby Connections for app devs, such as for AR games. There's Nearby Share for file sharing, which I hear might maybe be getting a Windows implementation but again seems locked down. I want so bad to see some drive forward on the transport layer, & we have so much to go with. Its a solid bet hostapd technically supports all these capabilities (it just does everything under the sun in wifi best I can tell), but we haven't harnessed this source.

Discussion

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton