I think the EU mandate forces them to do both, so that devices with AWDL are not advantaged over non-Apple devices with Wi-Fi Aware, so my read is that mandate will mean Apple devices will do both modes until they can transition AWDL off entirely.
Nothing, but since Apple is the only user of AWDL and WiFi Aware makes it redundant, why support both (in long term)?
Because they could want to offer WiFi Aware in the EU and AWDL anywhere else, even in the long term. And switch back to AWDL everywhere if the EU stops mandating interoperability some day in the future.
I’ll bet $100 that AWDL is better designed and will work better. It isn’t like Google didn’t have all the time and chances to do this right. Android beam worked 50% of the time. IIRC half of the failures were BT and half were WiFi. Airdrop is much more reliable than 50%
nothing excepts it doesn't make sense for them
basically the mandate requires them to not hamper WI-FI Aware in anyway which pushes developers into using AWDL instead, i.e. they require it to be as good +- some technical differences in features not so relevant for 3rd party use cases
and if you provide something which works as good why should they keep AWDL around, it's just double the dev cost and AWDL is getting older and Wi-Fi Aware is getting nice WiFi7 improvements soon
so as long as they don't have some use case outside of what Wi-Fi Aware is supposed to do which happens to work with AWDL they keeping both around long term is not a very good decision economically
Whats stopping Apple from doing both?