Allison Johnson, reporting for The Verge:

Google just announced some unexpected and welcome news: Pixel 10 owners can now send and receive files with Apple devices over AirDrop. And equally interestingly, the company engineered this interoperability without Apple’s involvement. Google says it works with iPhone, iPad, and macOS devices, and applies to the entire Pixel 10 series. While limited to Google’s latest phones for now, Google spokesperson Alex Moriconi says, “We’re bringing this new experience to Pixel 10 first before expanding to other devices.”

When we asked Google whether it developed this feature with or without Apple’s involvement, Moriconi confirmed it was not a collab. “We accomplished this through our own implementation,” he tells The Verge. “Our implementation was thoroughly vetted by our own privacy and security teams, and we also engaged a third party security firm to pentest the solution.” Google didn’t exactly answer our question when we asked how the company anticipated Apple responding to the development; Moriconi only says that “…we always welcome collaboration opportunities to address interoperability issues between iOS and Android.”

When the feature was first announced earlier on Thursday, I was in disbelief and wondered how it worked. “Surely this must be some kind of collaboration, right? I was wrong, and Google indeed accomplished this by itself. How it did that is an interesting computer science lesson but irrelevant nonetheless. What is relevant is the striking parallel between this feature and Beeper, a company that reverse-engineered the iMessage protocol in 2023, allowing interoperability between Android and iOS. Beeper used a backdoor in the Apple Push Notification Service, commonly known as APNS, and made its solution available via a subscription. Apple promptly shut it down, but took no legal action. The resulting ordeal was a drawn-out cat-and-mouse game in the spotlight, with every technology blogger, including yours truly, having something to say about it. (As a writer, I enjoyed it, but eventually sided with Apple in the end.)

The Beeper Mini situation didn’t turn into an all-out war because Beeper is a tiny start-up with not nearly enough cash to fight a legal battle. (Beeper was eventually absorbed into Automattic, the company that makes WordPress.com and Tumblr, and Eric Migicovsky, its founder, now works on rebooting the Pebble smartwatch.) Mostly, the game was fought between Google and Apple proponents in a niche corner of the internet. This is not the same game, and I would be surprised if it ends any way other than a drawn-out fight. If Apple decides to pull the plug on Google’s unauthorized access to AirDrop — if such a thing is even possible — Google will no doubt retaliate somehow, either in the courtroom or online. (Remember “Get the message?”) If Apple can’t pull the plug because Google’s access uses Apple devices in a data center somewhere, it will send Google a cease and desist at least and a lawsuit at most.

The last possible result is the honeymoon ending: Google and Apple collaborate to bring AirDrop to Android. The likelihood of this is slim but possible, since both companies are embroiled in antitrust cases from the Justice Department and don’t wish to appear anticompetitive even in the slightest. (The latter matters especially to Apple, which is subject to investigation, even under the amiable-to-bribes Trump administration.) After the Beeper Mini ordeal, Apple added support for the Rich Communication Service, or RCS, in iOS 18, streamlining communication between Android and iOS devices. Those messages still aren’t end-to-end encrypted, since Apple uses the open standard which lacks encryption as opposed to Google’s which has it, but that’s coming as soon as Google adopts the new version of RCS. There’s precedent for collaboration, especially under consumer pressure. (I’m a proponent of the honeymoon ending because interoperability is good.)

This sets aside whether or not I think an antitrust investigation would actually succeed in court. I don’t think Google’s argument — that it can reverse a private company’s technology however it wishes without permission — would hold up in the eyes of any jury or judge, especially since Google has itself advocated it shouldn’t share its private search data with competitors since that’s proprietary information. The same logic applies in both cases. But it’s unlikely that a case would go to trial in the end, given the importance of Google and Apple to each other. They have a search deal worth billions of dollars, and they’re about to have an artificial intelligence deal to bake Gemini into Siri for some high price. These companies are reliant on each other, and it’s unlikely they’d fight in a courtroom. They would probably just settle.