What was peer to peer mode, and what replaced it?
Peer to peer mode let two powered NFC devices exchange data directly, without either acting as a passive tag. It powered the era of tapping two phones together to share something. It remains in the standards and has been withdrawn from both mobile platforms.
What it was
The third mode defined by the standards, and the only one where neither side is a tag. Both devices are powered, either may initiate, and the exchange is a conversation between equals rather than an interrogation.
Technically it enabled two phones to hand data directly to each other. In practice it was mostly used to bootstrap something faster, because the bandwidth was never sufficient for real payloads.
What it felt like
Two phones touched back to back, a prompt, and a photograph or a link moving across. For a few years this was the most tangible demonstration of NFC available, and it was genuinely satisfying to use.
It was also fragile in ways demonstrations hid. Both phones needed the feature enabled, both needed their antennas roughly aligned, and both owners needed to know where those antennas were. In practice that last requirement failed constantly.
Why it went away
Because a better answer appeared for the same job. Discovering nearby devices over Bluetooth and transferring over Wi-Fi works across a table, needs no physical contact, no antenna hunting and no alignment. Once that existed, requiring two phones to touch was a worse experience, not a charming one.
There is a wider pattern here worth naming. NFC is unbeatable when one side has no battery and no interface: a card, a sticker, a poster. Between two powered devices with screens, it was always competing against radios that reach further and carry more, and it lost that competition on merit.
Android deprecated Android Beam in Android 10 and documents it as no longer in active development, remaining optionally available to device makers.
What to use now
For sharing between two phones, whatever the platform provides: Bluetooth discovery with a Wi-Fi transfer, or a link. Nothing about NFC improves that flow today.
For connecting a phone to an accessory, the handover pattern survives and thrives. Tapping a speaker or a printer to configure a connection uses the same idea and works, because touching an object is a natural gesture in a way touching another person's phone never quite was.
And for anything involving an object with no battery, NFC remains the only answer. Which is the point: the mode disappeared, the technology did not.
Frequently asked questions
Can I still tap two phones to share a file?
Not through any feature either platform currently offers. Sharing moved to mechanisms that find nearby devices over Bluetooth and transfer over Wi-Fi, which require no contact between the handsets.
Is peer to peer removed from the standards too?
The mode is defined in the standards. What has been withdrawn is platform support, meaning ordinary applications have no supported way to use it on current phones.
Why do some phones still list a beam or tap to share setting?
Older devices and older versions may retain settings from the era when this worked. Their presence does not mean a current phone on the other side will cooperate.
Did card emulation replace peer to peer?
No, they solve different problems. Card emulation lets a phone act as a credential in front of a reader. Nothing replaced peer to peer within NFC, because the job moved to other radios entirely.