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Ask HN: What is your fav “I can't believe in 2022 this still doesn't work right”

60 points by netfortius ↗ HN
Mine is iPhone as hotspot/'net sharing feature, for other mac products (macbook pro, macbook air, etc.), be it bluetooth or wifi, let alone non-mac clients == ongoing failures/stoppages, regardless of iPhone or macbook models.

293 comments

[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 352 ms ] thread
marginalia_nu
Dunno, I'm mostly missing the day when we had the technology to create responsive user interfaces. Like imagine we used to have progress bars that actually reported progress, not just some bogus animation.

Good times.

machinevision
I just miss responsive desktop applications. I see USD10000+ tools running in the browser and I just wish we went back to how solid applications were built in 1990s or 2000s.
marginalia_nu
I've said it before, but I genuinely think Windows 95 is the pinnacle of UX. It is amazingly intuitive.

The use of depth and colors is streets ahead of the contemporary flat GUIs. You never have to guess the type or state of a widget, or where it begins or ends. Buttons typically have both icons and text. Icons to make it quicker to navigate, text makes it accessible without being fluent in Linear B ideograms.

drstewart
It's amazing how often things break with absolutely no indication of why or what caused it. Load a page, get a completely blank screen or component. Why? No clue. Everything just silently fails and redirects you to a happy path, e.g. back to a home page or a starting screen. Maybe if you're lucky you'll get an "Oops, try again later or contact support for more help!"
jabroni_salad
The fashion industry is so rife with this. It seems like any URL that is more than a day old is going to 404 or silently redirect to the front page of the store.
yamtaddle
Super frustrating if you read fashion-related reddits. 90+% of links on posts more than a few months old are dead. Only the ones that go to Instagram albums or something like that, are usually still OK. True even for companies that mostly sell "timeless" fashions.
jabroni_salad
Yep, my workflow is Find something cool in an MFA inspo album -> find it in the comments -> 404. I dont know why I even bother sometimes. It's literally every brand from small botique to the gap, so it must be 'working' somehow, right?
onion2k
Browsers have had progress bars since ... well, a long time ago. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/pr...

Implementing a progress bar that works for things like "bytes uploaded" or "number of tasks in the queue" on the frontend is fairly trivial. The hard bit is how to transmit a progress value from the backend to the frontend. Typically that requires setting up either a socket or a keepalive connection, or polling an endpoint from the frontend, which is enough of a pain that very few web apps bother.

Ultimately everything required for this sort of feature is right there in every browser. It's the backend that's usually lacking.

marricks
You're missing the point. Of course we have "the technology" for them, but most companies/people decided it was a good idea to have progress bars lie.
marginalia_nu
Sure you can render them, that isn't the hard part, but can you make them work as well as in an immediate mode GUI?
andybak
Progress bars have always either lied or been useless predictors. It's a tough problem in the general case: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZnLZFRylbs
marginalia_nu
Why do they need to be smooth? What they offer is an indicator of progress. We can tell that the computer is doing something. Maybe not when it's done, but if the bar inches forward, it's not stuck at least. spinner.gif does not tell you any of those things.

Just check it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPv1gQ5Rs8A

giantrobot
The issue is progress is difficult to report. If I've got Process A displaying my progress bar and Process B doing the actual work I've got to have some sort of bidirectional communication between the two. It's more difficult if B is calling independent processes in the background. They need to report their status/progress to B which needs to broker those updates and pass back up to A.

It's not an intractable problem, just tricky and annoying. If a progress bar is a tiny fraction of an app's lifecycle it's a lot of work to make it accurate for little payoff.

antisthenes
Yep, now you just get a spinning disk, a frowny face and some inane message that "our elves broke something uwuuu" and asking you to contact their (nonexistent) support channels.

The hate for power users is real.

marginalia_nu
I think there's a significant shift from empowering users to controlling users.

Users have become an instrument, rather than ends in themselves. You're attempting corral them so they do something you want instead of empowering them and offering them tools they may need to do what they want to do.

The very notion of power users is deeply incompatible with this.

antisthenes
Yep, while the focus in the past was to appeal to power users (because they would bring in the regular users through word of mouth and recommendations), now that most users are already captive to a variety of platforms, the focus switched to dark patterns and deceptive practices to deepen the lock-in and increase switching costs.

Now power users are merely an inconvenience, since they usually advocate against dark patterns and prefer purely functional software.

I'm not sure how to really combat this. It might be too late.

arprocter
+1 on progress bars

Biggest offender is a large OS upgrade on Mac and it sits on that black screen. It often doesn't even say how long is left, but when it does the 'remaining time' is laughably wrong. Not really excusable when Apple have such a small range of hardware configs.

I've seen some Windows installers 'x remaining' consistently count upwards instead of downwards...or the other classic, it sits at 10% for a while and then suddenly jumps to 100

belfalas
Centering text in any technology. :)
forgotmypw17
HTML tables still work great, just like they did 20+ years ago.
andybak
Plus Grid and Flexbox work reliably now and are pretty simple to use.
rado
display: grid place-items: center
sergiotapia
Bluetooth. It sucks in every kind of way possible. It never connects when you want it to. It autoconnects when you DONT want it to. Pairing is a crapshoot and praying.

It's basically printers all over again. It sucks!

dangrie158
Wait, is the printers story over?
sigspec
No and that makes it worse
sergiotapia
Bought my brother laser printer in 2019. Zero maintenance zero worrying about the INK DRYING OUT (wtf) and my wife can print from the LAN or her phone. I've done zero tech support so that makes it worth every penny. To me it's a solved issue try it!
epicide
Bought my Brother laser printer in... 2017? The laser printing aspect is great[0], but I can count on one hand the number of times network printing has worked. I've completely changed network hardware a few times since then, so I'm pretty sure it's the printer.

[0]: Assuming you don't need color or images. Black and white images look awful.

wutbrodo
Primarily because it's become infinitely easier to avoid. I don't think I've printed much beyond sheet music in the last decade, and even that was trivially replaceable by a small tablet in situations where I didn't have a Kinko's nearby.
rdtwo
Yeah fucking Bluetooth is the real player of 2022. Even when it works it works poorly
brutusborn
My best/worst UX: my android phone sometimes temporarily increases the volume to 100% when i connect to headphones via bluetooth, then has the audacity to give me a warning that listening at high volume can be dangerous.
bobsmith432
Linux on the desktop
Mikeb85
Has been working just fine for at least a decade...
fsflover
Then (GNU/)Linux on the phone.
mariusor
Sailfish OS wants a word. Been running it since 2013 and before that it was Meego (also a full GNU/Linux distro) running on Nokia N9.
neoberg
No. There are still missing -important- stuff and "works but you have to stand on your hands while singing" kind of things. It's nowhere near being friendly to an end user unless someone picks and sets up the hardware and the software for them.
fsflover
Linux is problematic on hardware designed for other operating systems. My Librem 15 works flawlessly, including suspend and WiFi (without even any binary blobs).
neoberg
Yes, this is exactly what I'm saying. You have to know which devices play well with linux to have a relatively good experience.
stormbeard
Care to share some examples for the people who don’t share your opinion?
neoberg
The biggest thing keeping me from using Linux for my desktop pc right now is lack of HDR support.

Apart from that the whole display servers world is just not working well. Some things still don't support Wayland, you can't share screen easily, X has it's own issues etc. HiDPI is still problematic with both; you get weird scaling issues with apps and and the occasional humongous mouse cursor. Using multiple displays with different DPIs you again get scaling issues. Setting up multiple displays still requires fiddling with xrandr, xinerama etc.

Just let me know if you need more examples. I tried to fully switch to Linux many times spending lots of time + money (bought one of the "recommended" devices).

Mikeb85
> The biggest thing keeping me from using Linux for my desktop pc right now is lack of HDR support.

HDR is just a marketing term for software that increases the colour and black saturation of content beyond the actual input. For photography that means more saturation than what you see in real life, for video that means tweaking it after you receive the signal.

An OS can't "support" or not support HDR; if a video has HDR and your display has the dynamic range then you'll see it in "HDR". Unless you actually want your OS to post-process everything on the screen to have marginally higher contrast than normal?

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/what-is-hdr-in-w... https://www.pcworld.com/article/546269/auto-hdr-deep-dive-ho...

> Setting up multiple displays still requires fiddling with xrandr, xinerama etc.

Dunno what you're doing but you can literally just plug in another display and it'll work... And per-monitor scaling works on Ubuntu/Gnome.

neoberg
> HDR is just a marketing term for software that increases the colour and black saturation of content beyond the actual input. For photography that means more saturation than what you see in real life, for video that means tweaking it after you receive the signal.

Not even remotely correct. It is definitely not a marketing term. HDR is set of specifications and formats for capturing, storing and displaying visual data with a higher than "Standard" dynamic range. It basically carries more data and it requires proper color management. It has to be supported by relevant drivers and the display server. Right now there is no way to view HDR content (video, photos or games) under Linux.

If you are interested; there is some effort going on to enable this but it will probably take a couple more years.

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/m...

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pq/color-and-hdr

Mikeb85
https://www.veneratech.com/hdr-dolby-vision-meta-data-parame....

"HDR" is just metadata to pass along to the device to tell it how to optimally adjust the colours (or not adjust them). It's main use seems to be so that HDR displays can oversaturate "SDR" content in HDR mode.

> carries more data

Not really. The metadata isn't more colours or something, it just passes info to the device about certain aspects of the video.

HDR content will be HDR if the display has enough range regardless of whether or not the OS has HDR "mode". It's more about adjusting all the other content.

Dunno if you ever had a plasma TV back in the day but they could display way more contrast than LCDs of the day so you could adjust the settings to change the way all content looks. HDR metadata is basically that, but on a per-video basis. Useful enough but not some game changer... Which is why there's tons of articles about what HDR does and doesn't do.

Edit - where HDR really is great is photography... You take multiple photos of the same scene with different ISO and shutter settings then stitch them together for more colours than would otherwise be captured. But a screen can either display colours or it can't.

neoberg
You're getting somewhere but still not complete. HDR formats we have today use 10bit or 12bit bit depths so that alone is a big difference. About the metadata, HDR10 uses static metadata meaning whole content will have the same metadata but HDR10+ and Dolby use dynamic metadata.

HDR content "will not" be HDR if you're playing it under Linux. It will however be HDR if you play it under Macos or Windows (keeping everything else like the screen and content same). There is no way around this right now. So in basic terms you will not see the dark blacks and bright whites under Linux.

> Edit - where HDR really is great is photography... You take multiple photos of the same scene with different ISO and shutter settings then stitch them together for more colours than would otherwise be captured. But a screen can either display colours or it can't.

It's the same for video or games really. With HDR you can record and display more details and contrast.

And that HDR photo you just described will not be shown as HDR even if your display supports HDR if viewed under Linux

Mikeb85
HDR hasn't always meant 10 bit colour...

But anyhow, Ubuntu supports 10 bit colour and has for awhile:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DeepColourDepthSupportPlan

neoberg
HDR as we know today always meant 10 bit colour. Before that some screens emulated HDR in 8 bit color by doing dithering to -poorly- create the illusion of a wider luminance range.

edit: and 10 bit color support on its own is not enough for HDR. I mean I don't know why we are even discussing this honestly. HDR under Linux is not supported at all. It's not an opinion; it's an objective fact which you can confirm in a couple of different ways. You can not view HDR content if you're using Linux no matter what content or display you have. There is an active effort in the community to have HDR support in Linux but it will take a couple more years probably.

boring_twenties
Multiple displays have worked out of the box for me for over a decade. Nothing fancy here, just X11 with the plain jane MATE desktop (and Gnome 2 before that.)
neoberg
Multiple displays works well if both displays have the same or similar dpis. When they are different like one is hidpi and the other one is not, you get scaling issues.
yamtaddle
Can confirm, I try it every couple years and the jank and crashiness/glitchiness (application-level, not the kernel) still make me regret it in a matter of hours. Ran Linux for years on laptops and desktops but just had no idea how much time I was wasting, working around things it couldn't do or fixing broken shit or just living with some stuff not functioning correctly. Every time I go back I find it's the same. Whole foundation of the GUI stack and UI toolkit(s, which is part of the problem) need a tasteful, high-quality ground-up rethink and Wayland sure as hell ain't it.
Mikeb85
> and "works but you have to stand on your hands while singing" kind of things.

You mean "works if you don't actively try to break it".

Most stories about Linux breakage involve esoteric distros (especially bleeding edge "rolling" distros or one-man Ubuntu-derived distros) and users trying to "customize" shit they shouldn't.

Install Ubuntu and it's fine.

neoberg
> You mean "works if you don't actively try to break it".

No I mean "if you don't want to share your screen"

loufe
I second the "no". I have given Linux 3 tries (several months, and a lot of patience) over the last 10 years and each time I've had to ship back to windows at some point. It's not there.
Mikeb85
Not much info in this comment.

I've "tried" Windows too and simply can't deal with how terrible it is.

bobsmith432
Trust me, I don't use Windows either. Fedora KDE here and I still can say the desktop is not perfect.
bobsmith432
Except for some reason nobody uses it still, wonder why...
Mikeb85
No one uses PCs anymore... Relatively speaking.

Ever checked in on the youth lately? It's all smartphones, game consoles, iPads.

Students will use MacBooks/Laptops/Chromebooks for school if their course requires one but "devices" are the main computing device nowadays. Heck, even many non-technical business people have switched to iPads. Kiosks? Tablets.

The PC is no longer "the" personal computing device...

Mizza
Scroll a page. Click a link. Go back. You're back at the top of the thing you were scrolling.
andybak
This usually works for me unless someone has decided to make some SPA monstrosity that breaks things that usually work out of the box.
jasondigitized
Printing something from my computer. I can connect to servers all around the world and for whatever reason, I cannot predictably and reliably connect to printers in my home or office.
mynameisvlad
Have you tried your phone?

It might sound like a joke, but AirPrint on my iPhone has been the most reliable way to connect to my printer by far.

1123581321
We have trouble keeping Jira and Bitbucket synced. Both cloud products. How can they struggle with integrating themselves?! (Our GitHub repos sync just fine.)
hanoz
Copy and paste in Windows.
SV_BubbleTime
Not only does that actually work very well, the windows button + V to bring up clipboard history has been a huge time saver function a few times.
hanoz
That feature is nice, when it works, but like its ctrl+v counterpart, 20% of the time it just doesn't. Same problem with with ctrl-shift+p, which is supposed to paste just the plain text - a lot of the time, seemingly at random, it just gets into a state where it pastes the formatted version regardless, and I'm forced to paste into notepad and recopy to lose the formatting.
nikau
search for "puretext", set hotkey, live happily ever after.
ccleve
My inability to connect to a printer over the network reliably. Can't tell you how many times I have to "fix the printer" in my house.
mattw2121
I'm at the point that I am about to install a dedicated service that people in my house can just forward a document to via email and it will be printed. Then I have one place to troubleshoot instead of multiple PCs and phones.
peter-m80
Change the printer brand. I have a Brother laser printer and once configured the wifi on it, it is zero config. All my computers (linux, mac, windows) detect it over the network. I can also print from my android device.
pwinnski
Brother laser printers are life-changing. Set it and forget it, it just works, apparently forever.
thiht
Agree on Brother. I bought an inkjet Brother, not even a laser, and it's been working great so far.
pronik
I've bought an OKI color laser print/scan/copy combo after we last moved some four years ago. Best thing ever in general and I never had any connection problems. But yeah, the mere fact that you have to be choosing your hardware wisely is precisely the problem here.
sigspec
Mine is automated message handling in iOS.

Specifically I volunteer for a group that uses SMS with embedded links for the volunteers to tap to check in and out of a job. Frequently these links are truncated or divided in a way that makes their URL structure invalid. This happens all the time due to the difference in message length and how iOS handles longer messages.

I know this boils down to an SMS character limit kludge, but our Android users do not experience this. The message comes as one block or "bubble" but the iOS users see multiple bubbles that are frequently out of order.

freedomben
I think Tim Cook would tell you to use an iPhone for sending your automated messages, then it won't be a problem.
boring_twenties
Wouldn't short URLs work around your problem? (Yes, it's the iPhone's fault, but you don't have any chance of getting that fixed.)
webfork2
MS Office issues. The whole project back in the 90s as I understand it was that all of these productivity tools would work together. You write something up in Word, move that over into a PowerPoint slide and add in a cool data visual from Excel. I don't know what happened but they do NOT play nice together anymore. Tables don't copy right, I use a totally external program to screenshot the table or pie chart, and maintaining formatting between programs?

Fahgettabouttit.

Word is also remarkably bad with long (100+ page) documents and lots of different content sources. If you're not pasting as pure text into Microsoft Word, you're playing with fire.

Also, I suspect it's cruft inside the program that has made this problem actually worse over time, not just "still a problem". Thank god Markdown is now more widely supported, including on Microsoft-owned Github.

johnnyballgame
Where to even start with this... Ok, how about with Microsoft Outlook? The "undo" after deleting or moving an email works about 10% of the time. Sometimes it recovers the message, but most of the time it either does nothing or even better, brings back a totally different message!! smh
greenie_beans
the difficulty an ambulance sometimes has finding you after a wreck
jacquesc
Tried for hours this weekend trying to share files from my Mac Laptop to a Windows 11 PC over the network. Both had latest versions of operating systems.

Could not for the life of me get it working. Had to dig up a usb thumbdrive.

I used to have this working fine in 2002.

manaX
I find it handy to use python's http.server module in command line for this.
MonkeyMalarky
Bluetooth. Especially when paired with the infotainment systems in cars.
mauvehaus
Shit, I'd be happy if the Mobil stations near me would correctly implement chip cards on their gas pumps. Every friggin' time, they ask for a PIN and refuse to take "no" for an answer. Every. Time.

It's a credit card. It doesn't have a damn PIN in the US, and I have to go inside to pay for gas every time. I've quit buying gas at the area Mobil stations because of the hassle. Most of the other chains seem to get it right.

How is it that Europe has been doing chip cards (with PIN) for decades, and we can't get this right?

jabroni_salad
I have CCs from barclays and capital1 and both of them let you set a PIN. It just isn't a forced workflow like with debit cards.
mauvehaus
I inquired with the issuer. I can set a PIN for a cash advance, but not a regular sale. Which is fair, I guess. They are fundamentally different transactions with different interest rules, etc. Nonetheless, it's a very frustrating situation that the solution almost exists, but can't be used.
janvdberg
That my phone can't decide if I'm typing English or Dutch (and set the spellchecking accordingly)
mynameisvlad
SwiftKey offers dual language keyboards. It’ll suggest and autocorrect based on which language it thinks you’re using.

It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good.

vanderZwan
This is the first thing I've seen so far that's genuinely surprising to me given all the machine learning breakthroughs of recent years.

Lots of other things mentioned piss me off too, but I can usually see (to my dismay) where the perverse incentives lie, or the lack of a market drive, or whatever.

This seems like a problem people would like to see solved, where nobody has reason to get in the way of solving it, and that should be solvable by now.

Mikeb85
What phone?

Google's keyboard is great for exactly this (I type in 4 different languages regularly).

ccleve
Database versioning. Why can't I have version control on a database record just like we do for documents? Why do we have to implement audit trails over and over again?
forgingahead
Printers and bluetooth (separately), easily the two weakest links of any computing chain.
joezydeco
Software (including web frontends) that can't properly pluralize quantities in English.

It goes "0 Days, 1 Day, 2 Days".

Not "0 Days, 1 Days, 2 Days". Or, worse, "0 Day(s), 1 Day(s), 2 Day(s)".

wizzwizz4
To be fair, pluralisation is hard. If you want it to work in English, but you want your software to support translations, you have to call a function and give it all the information necessary for all languages you support. That includes:

• are there 3 or 4? (Plural isn't just zero/one/many in every language.)

• is the quantity small-ish, or large-ish, compared to normal?

• what's the grammatical position of the noun you want to pluralise?

You'd have to have something a lot more sophisticated than string substitution. And there isn't really a pressing need for it. Day(s) works fine.

songshu
Cancel next iteration of alarm on iPhone.
[deleted]
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capableweb
Transferring files between two computers/phones/devices right next to each other, regardless of operating system.

Most solutions rely on sending a file to some server in probably a different country, and then downloading said file on the other computer. Or, using a USB stick to pass the file from one to the other.

alternatetwo
Or even just a small piece of text, i.e. a link. I have a samba share on one system for files, but that is certainly not "regardless of operating system", as it's a pain to do that with a phone.

So a discord server with just me in it is ... also gives you handy direct links for files up to 8mb.

jeffbee
AirDrop? Always works flawlessly in my experience.
marricks
It sure does, but they said "regardless of operating system." Outside of the apple-verse it still sucks.
jeffbee
Oh I see. I took it to mean there are no platforms where this works, but they make there is no scheme that works across all platforms? The problem with the latter form of the question is there will always be some garbage platform that doesn’t participate.
dalyons
i know you probably know this & you said OS agnostic - but apple really nailed this between macs and iphones. The shared clipboard feels like magic, and airdrop works great too.
JCWasmx86
`python -m http.server` if they are in the same network? Sure, you have no authentication/security, but for quick+dirty it works fine
capableweb
AFAIK, python doesn't ship by default on any operating system anymore (used to on macOS). Otherwise yeah, it's a good contender. You'd still need to pass the URL somehow to the other machine :)
hdjjhhvvhga
I think it does on several major Linux distros .
prego_xo
Perhaps the 3DS was on to something with those tiny IR sensors on the front.
thesuperbigfrog
IR transfers worked great on Palm Pilots (and their successors) and many models of graphing calculators.
vanderZwan
KDE Connect works for me. Granted, I've only tried it between an android phone and a Linux laptop, but I've heard from others it works well on other OSes and phones too:

https://kdeconnect.kde.org/download.html

(It's also great as a remote control for your laptop when watching a movie or series on a projector)

JCWasmx86
For me transmitting any file over the network between my android(Termux) and my laptop(Fedora) is awful. It starts with a quite fast transmission (Like 60 Mbps), but always drops to just a few kbps after a few hundred megabytes. Netcat does this, python HTTP-Server, FTP, scp, everything fails.
vanderZwan
... including, I presume, KDE Connect?

I feel your pain, I tried tons of other solutions before discovering KDE Connect. It works well for my laptop/phone combination, but I'm not surprised if it doesn't work for others, given how horrible each other solution was that I've tried.

edit: I wonder if perhaps some part of your phone hardware overheats after N megabytes because it's not built for constant file transfer, or constant file transfer using these protocols at least? What if you try throttling it on purpose?

JCWasmx86
Yeah, KDE Connect did the same.

I think it is the fault of the network stack of one those two devices, otherwise I can't explain that. Maybe that the devices receive/send data faster than they are able to process. (Is this even possible?)

But I could be awfully wrong

Regarding your edit: That's a good idea, but I never attempted that. I can't test that, because I'm in a Wifi where no device is allowed to talk to another :(

Eudai
$ cd /directory/with/files/you/want/to/share

$ python3 -m http.server 1337

Then just connect to the IP and Port of the machine hosting the python http server and transfer away.

Aside from Bluetooth I'm not sure how you'd do this without using a LAN or WAN.

hellisothers
Love this reply, giving me “Why Dropbox just rsync vibes” :)
jrootabega
I do this but I always get a little nervous about it being accessible to any process anywhere on that network. If the system firewall supports it, I think it would be interesting to make the http connection, and then restrict that port to existing connections only. Once you are confident only your intended client has connected, put the files in the directory.
anotherhue
I think croc is a superior solution here. Encrypted transfer. Automatic local peer detection. Human speakable commands. Turns off when you’re done. No firewall fiddling (and unfiddling)

Pythons web server is single threaded I believe so any simultaneously connections break.

https://github.com/schollz/croc

voxic11
I just use https://file.pizza/ works on any OS with a web browser and the file is transferred p2p so its very fast over local networks. And the Url is easy to remember.
capableweb
Looks great and P2P is of course required for this, but sadly it'd only work when online :/

Would be great with local network discovery of p2p peers but seemingly browsers are not really interested in enabling that...

gmemstr
Taildrop (https://tailscale.com/kb/1106/taildrop/) mostly filled this for me, although this is just for the same Tailnet. AirDrop is also pretty slick. Otherwise I chuck it onto my NAS.

Of course all of these solutions have some serious pre-requisites...

wizzwizz4
This is the only thing that Bluetooth consistently works for. I can send files between my laptop and my feature phone, and other people's laptops, and other people's phones… It's more reliable than email.

Bluetooth doesn't consistently work for connecting I/O devices to my computer, though. Only peer-to-peer file transfer.

capableweb
Bluetooth almost got me 100% there as well! Until I discovered that Apple devices don't support sending/receiving files via Bluetooth. But at least it covers about 80% of the devices I own and doesn't rely on external services like most other options people wrote about as a reply.
wizzwizz4
Macbooks do; there's an app called Bluetooth File Exchange. Most people I know with iPhones have macOS laptops, too, so I can send to that.
capableweb
Ah, sadly the 20% in the amount I wrote about above is one iPhone that won't play nice with the Bluetooth coverage I have at home with other devices :/
domador
Yes! One should be able to take advantage of the speed of a local transfer. One doesn't always have access to a blazingly fast Internet connection and file-transfer service through which to transfer data. One should be able to transfer data between neighboring devices even when no Internet connections are available.
Eavolution
KDE Connect is a godsend for this. Surprisingly its on windows too
tpoacher
I'm pretty pissed off that infrared got phased out as a technology. Doubly so that this was replaced by bluetooth.

Yes it was slow, but it worked straightforwardly and reliably, every, single, time.