Software · guide

How to turn on airdrop, and why it keeps turning off

By Alberto Gulotta · Updated 23 September 2026 · 9 min read

How to turn on airdrop is often asked by somebody who already has. It was turned on last month, it worked, and today the other phone is not appearing. The switch is not the problem, and this guide is mostly about the four things that have to be true around it.

That third item is worth pausing on, because it is documented by Apple in one line and repeated almost nowhere. A phone sharing its connection cannot AirDrop, and on a phone that shares its connection to a laptop every morning, Personal Hotspot can easily still be on hours later. Two people standing next to each other, both with AirDrop set to Everyone, neither appearing to the other, and the cause is a switch on an unrelated screen.

Now the setting itself, which is the second half of the answer and the part that makes AirDrop feel unreliable when it is behaving exactly as designed.

Which produces a small practical habit worth adopting. If you are about to receive something from somebody who is not in your contacts, set Everyone for 10 Minutes at the moment you need it, not in advance. Setting it early is the reliable way to have it lapse before the transfer starts.

On recent software there is a further step in that situation. From iOS 26.2 and its equivalents, somebody who is not in your contacts must use an AirDrop code: you tap Get AirDrop Code, read the code out, and they type it in. It is a sensible answer to unsolicited files from strangers on trains.

It has a consequence that deserves stating plainly, because it is not obvious from the screen. Accepting the code opens a thirty-day window in which that person can send you things without asking again — Apple: “You can continue to share and receive items using AirDrop with that person for 30 days.” If you would rather not leave that open, the control exists and is well hidden: open Contacts, find them in the Other Known list, and choose Forget This Person.

It is worth saying why any of that machinery exists, because Apple’s pages describe the setting and not the reason. The reason is published somewhere else entirely. Announcing that cyberflashing would become a criminal offence, the UK government described the behaviour and named the channel: it “typically involves offenders sending an unsolicited sexual image to people via social media or dating apps, but can also be over data sharing services such as Bluetooth and Airdrop”, with a penalty of “up to two years in prison”. It also gives the scale it was answering: research it cites found that “32 percent of girls aged 12-18 surveyed had received an unsolicited nude picture of men or boys”.

The government page does not mention Apple and Apple’s page does not mention the law. Reading the setting as an answer to the behaviour is ours rather than either publisher’s — but it is the reading that makes the ten-minute limit look like a design decision instead of an inconvenience, which is the practical difference between fighting the setting and using it.

One more failure has a cause that surprises people, and it happens between two people who genuinely are in each other’s contacts. Apple states the requirement in full: if you are sending to somebody who only accepts from contacts, “you must be in their contacts list and they need to have your Apple Account email address or phone number included in your contact card”. Being in the address book is not enough. The card has to carry the right address — and a contact saved from a work email, or from a number that is not the one on the Apple Account, will fail silently and look like a fault in AirDrop.

The sending half is the short half, and it is the same shape in every app: open the thing, tap Share, tap AirDrop, tap the person. To airdrop photos specifically, Apple’s route is Photos → Select → choose them → Share → AirDrop, and multiple photos go in one send rather than one at a time. Going the other way, to airdrop from mac to iphone, the only difference is where the control lives — the menu bar instead of Control Center — and that between your own signed-in devices nobody has to accept anything. Which is the whole of how to airdrop: the sending was never the difficult part.

Two pieces of good news to finish, both from Apple’s own pages and both rarely mentioned. Transfers are encrypted. And “if you leave Bluetooth or Wi-Fi range after an AirDrop transfer is initiated, the transfer continues over the internet” — so walking away mid-send does not necessarily lose it.

Between your own devices it is simpler still: sign both in to the same Apple Account and items are accepted and saved automatically, with no prompt to tap at the other end.

The guides below split it four ways: turning it on and the conditions around it, the reasons it fails, the privacy side of receiving from strangers, and what to use instead when AirDrop is the wrong tool — which it is for anything larger than a handful of files.

Not covered here. It will not recommend an app. AirDrop is built in, free, encrypted, and the third-party tools sold against this question are answering a question the phone already answers.

It will not tell you to leave Everyone switched on. Apple made that setting temporary deliberately, and the ten-minute limit is the feature rather than the annoyance.

And it will not guess at causes. Every failure listed here is one Apple documents, quoted, with the page it came from at the bottom. What holds instead is simple: the reverting setting and the contact-card requirement are quoted from Apple’s own support pages.