Beginning in iOS 16.2, Apple will broaden the reach of the AirDrop restriction that says that you can only have your AirDrop sharing set to everyone for 10 minutes at a time worldwide, in which after that it will revert to Contacts Only mode. The feature debuted in China to help crack down on protestors talking about VPNs, organizing, and trying to condemn President Xi Jinping.
The speculation for this change only in China, according to Engadget, was because "Apple could be trying to thread the needle between appeasing China — where it manufactures most of its products and makes about 20 percent of its revenue — and limiting the domestic PR damage from acquiescing to an authoritarian regime."
The byproduct, which is also one of the few positives, is that it will be less likely to receive random unwanted and sometimes inappropriate pictures from strangers via AirDrop.
With this change, you will need to manually change to Everyone mode every time you want to share pictures and files to random strangers, providing that it's been more than 10 minutes since you last shared a file to a stranger. It's not the end of the world, but it does make things inconvenient, at least for the rest of the world.
