A major failure point for me is devices simply not showing up as available.

tgv · on Jan 2, 2022

I’ve got an MBP that doesn’t show up, and never has, but it sees the rest. Any other macbook or iphone I’ve tried AirDrop with just works, but not my MBP.

notreallyserio · on Jan 2, 2022

I've had trouble with airdrop from phone to mbp when the mbp was on VPN. I don't know how airdrop works but I'm guessing the fact the VPN takes over DNS (and blocks requests to all other nameservers) has something to do with it.

Who knows though. Apple's engineers love writing software that doesn't produce useful logs.

tgv · on Jan 2, 2022

They do love clogging the logs with useless messages, though, as anyone who’s opened Console can testify.

reaperducer · on Jan 2, 2022

I've had similar experiences.

iOS devices always show up, no problem.

Macs at home only do occasionally. Until the latest macOS update, my MacBook Pro would only show up if I opened an AirDrop Finder window.

But when I was in the office, my work group of about 15 people would AirDrop files back-and-forth to one another all day long, without a hiccup.

It is a mysterious beast.