Unreliable wireless features

[hagar]

Airdrop, Handoff, Continuity, Universal Clipboard, ... all great features but sooooo unreliable. Does anyone use these features all day without problems? I move a lot (home, office, ...) switching between wireless networks and it seems these features cannot keep up. They work 25% of the time, and it's never clear why they do or don't. Usually rebooting one or more devices fixes the problem, but that's such a windows solution. Because they are so unreliable I seem to forget about them after a while.

Anybody better results or solutions?

 

[mfram]

The problem in a corporate wireless setup is that there may be a lot of filtering going on behind the scenes limiting how much different devices can see each other on the network. If there's any multicast filtering going on in the network those features are likely not going to work since they rely on the Bonjour technology that Apple uses. And Bonjour depends on a pretty open network. Corporate networks are generally not very open.

 

[hagar]

I understand that, but the problem is that the features simply work inconsistently. For instance, at home I have an Airport network that is obviously fully compatible with all features. One day it works, the next day it doesn't. Or it works on my Mac, but not on my iPhone. Or vice-versa.

Restarting devices only fixes things temporarily. Same at work. The network infrastructure is compatible but I cannot rely on those features as they don't work all the time. And I'm wondering why that is. Are they really that buggy?

And I'm not the only one. Nobody I know uses Airdrop. First of all, because they don't know it's there and how to operate it. But second, if they try it almost never works.

 

[steve62388]

I find Airdrop a bit flaky, sometimes targets show up sometimes they don't without rhyme or reason.

I also find Airplay a bit wonky where my speaker disappears as a target. But I can't rule out network problems or the speaker itself for this one so I tend not to blame Apple for it. The Airdrop is a different story though, it's just iPhone to iPhone so that's definitely Apple's screw up.

 

[Easttime]

Yup. I have a new 2016 MBP-TB and a 2014 MacMini. They airdropped fine until today. Now neither of them can see each other in Airdrop, but they can both see my iPad. All the usual troubleshoot checks are negative. Rebooted the MBP-TB and they popped up on each other's screen. No rhyme or reason I can see. Just a gremlin.