Not really the same at all, airdrop doesn’t require you to be on the same network. From what I understand airdrop does an unspec’d bluetooth thing for discovery and then wifi-direct (p2p wifi) for transfer for much higher transfer speeds.

Closest thing to achieving this on linux is https://github.com/seemoo-lab/opendrop but last I tried the wifi card driver I was using didn’t support it.

The fact that the open source hackers are so behind on this is a bit sad because the tech is mindblowing. 

 Well its the problem of unified tech stack - if you control the entire platform (he and sw) its much easier to ensure compatibility, doing it generic for endless amount of hw options and drivers is a different game