I wonder if it's more reliable than Apple's own implementation for MacOs. It used to be rock solid – and between iOS devices it still is – but between Macs I regularly have to switch both to "Search for an older Mac" to make them see each other, with no explanation why.
Interesting, my own experience has been the opposite. From what I remember v1 was constantly broken, initial v2 was not much better but now everything is very smooth all the time.
I had massive issues with Airdrop 2 when it first came out. After many lengthy chats with Apple support it managed to resolve itself. All I can offer and a working solution is signing out and back into iCloud on each affected device. This of course comes with the resync penalty.
I’ve found it very flaky on iOS - regularly try to transfer between my phone and my wife’s sitting next to each other and it will randomly not see the other phone or take minutes to find it :(
I've never had issues with iOS - discovery is near immediate every time. The only time I've had issues is when sharing with random people that have it set to contacts only and we haven't shared a contact, or if someone turned wifi off manually.
On the Mac though, it is a different story. Just yesterday my wife was trying to send me a PDF and I had to send it to my phone from her Mac, then dump it into iCloud Drive. I rebooted my Mac and then it worked again - but these are stock 2018/2019 Apple laptops, they shouldn't have these issues.
