So yesterday I tested WiFi Direct against Quick Share and to my surprise (kinda) WiFi Direct was much faster than the latter
Tried sending a 1.21GB video file from a Galaxy S6 to a galaxy note 9
- WiFi Direct: 54.71 MB/s
- Quick Share: ~33 MB/s
OneUI can show network speed in real-time in the notification panel, that’s how I captured these numbers and they were very stable and I did it multiple times just to confirm.
Unfortunately samsung and all other OEMs have basically killed WiFi Direct, I can only receive files, they removed the option to send files through WiFi Direct on newer versions of android (I think A11 and later) a long time ago that’s why I can’t do this test in reverse (from N9 to S6)
I tried looking up for an app on Google play store, galaxy store, F-Droid that can send files using WiFi Direct but found nothing, that’s really puzzling for me, like why?! This standard is very old by now, it’s been on our phones for more than a decade and yet no way to fully utilize it?!
For the ones who don’t know WiFi Direct is a P2P connection.
WiFi Direct is indeed a P2P connection, but not much else. The APIs are still there, but you can’t manage it easily through the UI anymore. And honestly, it never really made sense to do that, anyway. Connecting is just step one, you need additional software to actually use the connection once it’s been made. There is no “standard” for transferring files over WiFi direct like there is with Bluetooth.
Many years ago, some phones had “WiFi Direct” as a sharing option that used some proprietary protocol. Worked great on device that shared the implementation (mostly Samsung-to-Samsung, I think), but support was removed at some point. It was never really a standardised mechanism, even though it worked really well.