AirDrop not working on Mac? Find the stage where it stops

Stage one: the recipient never appears

Nothing to click means nothing has been sent, so this is a discovery problem and everything further down the chain is irrelevant for now. Turn on Wi-Fi and Bluetooth at both ends, keep the Macs within about 10 metres, and on the receiver open Finder's AirDrop window with Shift-Command-R to see the discovery scope. Current macOS shows that scope when you expand AirDrop in Control Centre too. If the icon appears the moment both radios are on, the radios were your fault and you are finished.

If the receiver is set to Contacts Only, its contact card for the sender has to carry the Apple Account email address or phone number the sender is signed in with. Switching the receiver to Everyone for one agreed test is diagnosis, not a fix — if the icon appears then, the contact details were wrong and not the network. Put the scope back afterwards.

Stage two: the recipient appears, but sending waits

A visible recipient rules out Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and the discovery scope, so stop adjusting them. Ask the receiver to check notifications and any open Finder AirDrop window, then accept. Between your own devices on one Apple Account, acceptance can happen automatically, which means an Accept button that never appears is not by itself a fault.

On macOS 26.2 and later, sending to someone who is not a contact can require a code. The receiver chooses Continue or Get AirDrop Code and reads the code to the sender, who enters it in the transfer prompt. Clicking the recipient again does not answer a pending code request. It usually just opens a second one.

Stage three: it starts, then stops

Byte progress proves the two Macs found each other and agreed to talk, which rules out every discovery and acceptance cause above. Open the source file first, to be certain it is really on the sending Mac, and download anything still sitting as a cloud placeholder. Then check free space on the receiver and retry with a single small PDF instead of a large mixed selection. If the small file completes, the path works and what remains is the size, the number of files, or one particular item in the batch.

If the radios and the receiving settings are all correct and transfers still stop halfway, save your work and restart both Macs before going further. On a managed machine, restrictions belong to whoever administers it — describe the failing stage to them rather than switching off security configuration at random.

Keep the retries comparable. Same small file, same recipient, change one thing, send once, note which stage you reached. Moving from stage one to stage three is real progress worth recording, and it is not a reason to repeat all the earlier checks. And whatever happens, do not delete the source until you can open the received copy.

Stage four: it finished, but the file is nowhere

A completed transfer rules out the network entirely, and this turns into a search problem on the receiving Mac. Look in Downloads, then in whichever app was chosen while accepting — a photo routed into Photos will not be sitting beside the PDF. Search by filename and sort by the time of the transfer before you send three more copies.

If it really is absent, run the sending sequence again in order using the AirDrop walkthrough, and watch which stage you reach this time.

AirDrop not working on Mac, or just not worth repeating

There is a different complaint hiding inside some of these searches: AirDrop works perfectly, and picking the same recipient twenty times a day is the actual problem. Deskferry addresses that pattern, not this one. Copy a file in Finder on A, paste it into the working folder on B, and no recipient gets chosen at all.

It will not repair a broken AirDrop transfer, and it has nothing to offer for iPhones or one-off recipients. It expects macOS 14 or later, a trusted group, and a local network both Macs can reach; files and videos use the administrator's Pro or Max entitlement, and folders use Max. Read the Deskferry file guide to judge whether that fits how you work. On an office network, check first that traffic between the two Macs is permitted at all.