Bump didn't use direct device-to-device communication. A central server correlated the two bumping phones, based on geolocation and accelerometer data, then swapped the data via the server. At least that's how it worked in the early days. (Wiki page confirms)

Since it's relying on your internet connection, skeptical it'd be faster than AirDrop for a large amount of data like photos. But for swapping contacts I bet it was faster since it didn't have to spend time establishing a new direct connection.

Waaay back when in Japan, sekigaisen (infrared) was a verb meaning to transfer contact details or photos or whatever between phones via infrared. It was amazing how fast the iPhone took over Japan and killed off their quirky phone ecosystem.

Edit: want to emphasize that it was totally ubiquitous. Every phone has it

When I was pretty early in my career, I inherited a legacy project from the CTO who didn't want to maintain it anymore. We decided as a team that I'd just recreate the project with a modern tool chain.

A few weeks later, the CTO looked at my work and asked why it was missing xyz features from his legacy project, saying that if I'm gonna take a project and rewrite it, it better be at least as good as the old project.

It was a pretty good lesson for me to get early in my career, and I've carried it with me ever since. Don't break or rewrite that which already works.

It's evident that no one at Google ever got that lesson.

NB: I know Google definitely has other reasons for acquiring and killing off Bump — they were probably building a competing technology that was shitty and bump was doing it better and sooner than them so better to buy and kill than to make their own product better. But I think my the lesson from my anecdote still stands from a purely product point of view, and I feel like it should make business sense but apparently you can make bad micro business decisions as long as you can convince shareholders they were good macro business decisions.

I do wonder how many great little user-friendly bits of software got destroyed in aquishutdowns. Incredible way to deploy capital to delete software, but that's the big internet world for you.

> Waayy back in 2009 we had Bump [1], which allowed transfer between devices and later web apps as well

Over the Internet. There are dozens of such services, and none of them can compete with Airdrop.

The main point of Airdrop is that it doesn't need Internet connectivity and won't use any metered data (or, on recent iOS versions, at least if Wi-Fi Assist is turned off, I believe).

Just as important is the fact that there's no need to install any application – any Apple device comes with Airdrop preinstalled.

What's sad is what largely replaced device to device transfers was just messaging apps. But messaging apps compress media horribly. iMessage isn't so bad, but send a photo through almost anything else and all meta data is stripped, and the image resolution and bitrate are the absolute bare minimum to look ok on a phone. But try to print it and it will be horrible.

If I am not mistaken, Bump still required a connection to the Internet. WiFi Aware does not, because the phones create an ad-hoc link on the spot.

The connection can be very fast. In this example, a 280 MB file is transferred in less than 10 seconds:

https://vimeo.com/418946837

Bump was like magic.

The only app I have ever truly thought “this is the future”

Very cool, didn't know such app had existed, thank you! Wanted to use a similar approach to connect people in a smaller friends-only social network.

I can almost guarantee it wasn’t faster than airdrop (when it works) is today. I remember using bump on wifi, and it was limited to (shocking) wifi speeds at the time. I have as recently as last week transferred 1GB video files in under 20 seconds using airdrop. That simply was not possible in 2009.