Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#151

Post by layer8 » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 5:55 PM UTC

scosman wrote: post #94

diggan wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget the classic "Oh, that 3rd party app/feature is so popular, I bet we could build a identical/slightly less useful thing ourselves so people don't have to use other things than Apple software ever"

I've never understood this Apple criticism (scherlocking). Someone built a search for your files, so it's not right for Apple to build a pretty key feature into the OS? There's a lot of fair criticisms of Apple, but they don't have to be absolutely first at everything or never enter the market.

The issue is that they don’t compete on equal footing, because they integrate whatever functionality they adapt with OS features and/or first-party apps in a way that third-party apps can’t. That’s anti-competitive and increases their moat.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#152

Post by browningstreet » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 5:55 PM UTC

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #148

vessenes wrote: post #101

I guess I’ll take the contra here on messages integration — moving a message over BLE to untrusted hardware and worse accepting them back into iMessage is a massive, massive change in the security boundary and therefore security architecture and therefore security promises that apple makes on iMessage. I do not believe average smartwatch users understand what they’d be doing if they got this. I do not believe vendors…

> moving a message over BLE to untrusted hardware and worse accepting them back into iMessage is a massive, massive change in the security boundary Is it? My iPhone replicates messages to my mac from where a process can extract that data, it can capture the screen etc. I can use a mac today to set up a relay that would then send those messages to a smart watch if one would do that.

Same with Phone Link on Windows.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#153

Post by skyyler » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 5:55 PM UTC

distrill wrote: post #100

josefresco wrote: post #3

I have a very capable smartwatch and it's ridiculously bad how hobbled it is on iOS. I'm glad to see this article specifically highlight the issues, and how it's 100% Apple's intention to make non-Apple wearables on iOS terrible.

it's pretty frustrating how "apple people" just don't care that it's apples fault. i routinely hear my wife mutter "i hate google so much!" when a google maps integration is being intentionally hobbled to keep her using apple maps. or when she has trouble managing rcs conversations because somebody in our social world has the gall to be on an android phone.

What kind of trouble does she have managing rcs conversations? It works fine for my partner on their iPhone.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#154

Post by rickdeckard » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 5:56 PM UTC

parsimo2010 wrote: post #33

bearjaws wrote: post #2

It's honestly amazing how Apple managed to dodge anti-trust in the United States. The fact you cannot build a competing watch is unacceptable and the idea that "well go build one for Android" is refusing to acknowledge that Apple is its own market in and of itself. Throw in the fact that even getting an app that isn't a game into the App store is not trivial, especially if it dares include some form of payment proces…

Obviously this is going to be up for debate, but in your comment you acknowledge that "go build one for Android" is an option. This is an indication that your complaint is not in Apple's behavior, but your regret that the competition sucks and it's not Apple's fault. Apple is not a market on their own from the perspective of smart phones and watches, every person making a purchasing decision has options (This is diff…

> Apple is not a market on their own from the perspective of smart phones and watches.

Apple actually acts as a gatekeeper to the smart watch market when used with their devices, because they provide core platform services as a gateway for these products to operate and communicate with end-users, but define rules and restrictions which don't apply for Apple smart watches themselves.

> Apple is its own market from the perspective of app developers.

Exactly. They create a market while giving themselves preferential treatment. They do the same with smart watches, therefore not ensuring a level playing field in that market.

> If Apple did something anticompetitive to keep Android options from being good, then you probably have a winnable legal case.

But isn't that's the case Pebble is making here?

There is actually a Wear OS iOS App from Google to connect Android Wear devices with iPhones, and beside the fact that it's not possible to connect any non-Apple Watch to the iPhone without manually installing a separate App, Google is not able to provide the same functionality as Apple Watch does even when incorporating such a companion app.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#155

Post by sunshowers » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 5:56 PM UTC

ch4s3 wrote: post #137

sunshowers wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why doesn't Apple openly market that it's doing stuff in its financial interest? Is it too embarrassed to point that out?

I'm not sure I follow? Every company does what is in their own financial interest. Even b-corps and non-profits have to keep an eye on their balance sheets.

The point is that Apple does not actually care about you on the basis of principles. It only cares about you to the extent that it serves its own financial interests.

This is important because Apple could one day decide that caring about you no longer serves its interests. This has already happened with user experience, where even the Settings app now has built-in ads pushing Apple's services. It has also happened with security, where Apple uses its robust security infrastructure to prioritize media company DRM over users' interests.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#156

Post by kennysoona » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 5:56 PM UTC

etchalon wrote: post #105

I have a hard time sorting out the difference between a "restriction" and an "unwillingness to devote resources to making easy".

Restricting something isn't the opposite of devoting resources to make something easy.

This is a false, and very strange, dichotomy.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#157

Post by seanhunter » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 5:56 PM UTC

Nextgrid wrote: post #110

vessenes wrote: post #101

I guess I’ll take the contra here on messages integration — moving a message over BLE to untrusted hardware and worse accepting them back into iMessage is a massive, massive change in the security boundary and therefore security architecture and therefore security promises that apple makes on iMessage. I do not believe average smartwatch users understand what they’d be doing if they got this. I do not believe vendors…

> moving a message over BLE to untrusted hardware and worse accepting them back into iMessage is a massive, massive change in the security boundary Anyone can already screenshot iMessages and move them out of the "security boundary"... which btw doesn't exist much, as if you have any Mac connected to your iCloud account then those messages are being synced to an SQLite DB any process running under your user can acces…

I don’t think you understand what the security boundary of iMessage is.

People’s phones got compromised by NSO sending images to them via whatsapp that used an exploit in one of the image libraries to run a malware payload. The security boundary isn’t about whether you can see your own messages, it’s whether bad people can root your phone by getting untrusted code to run. That’s a very different proposition if iMessage is a single codebase that they fully own end to end versus it has a plugin ecosystem. Having such a plugin system widens the security boundary by adding a much larger codebase that would require trust.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#158

Post by celsoazevedo » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 5:56 PM UTC

culi wrote: post #138

mistercheph wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So sick of this strawman dialectic from the apple-brained, where the alternative to the walled garden is the worst possible implementation of an open standard.

Firefox is also frequently criticized for not implementing certain APIs because of security concerns. There was a post on this site just the other day about their lack of support for WebUSB for exactly this reason It's not unique to Apple. And we should take security seriously. To people who are technically literate and think they can navigate security risks it's not a big deal but people's entire lives are frequentl…

The main difference is that with Firefox no one can use the API. Apple seems to be happy to implement APIs... but only their own products can use them.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#159

Post by EA-3167 » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 5:57 PM UTC

ch4s3 wrote: post #125

sunshowers wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that this argument happens to conveniently align with Apple's financial interests.

If your value prop to customers is seamless and secure default behavior, then of course blocking insecure peripherals aligns with your financial interests. This doesn't seem nefarious at all to me.

Something I learned a while ago is that there's a particular brand of very vocal person online who has a bone to pick with Apple. Sometimes it's for a good reason, sometimes less so, but the point is that they come to discussions of any Apple topic with a conclusion ready in hand and then work backwards from that. In this case the conclusion is, "Apple is wicked, perfidious, and monopolistic."

Truthfully there isn't much you can say to people in that mindset.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#160

Post by avgDev » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 5:57 PM UTC

ch4s3 wrote: post #125

sunshowers wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that this argument happens to conveniently align with Apple's financial interests.

If your value prop to customers is seamless and secure default behavior, then of course blocking insecure peripherals aligns with your financial interests. This doesn't seem nefarious at all to me.

As a customer I would like to be able to make that decision. I don't need apple to hold my hand. They could inform me in the app store or when I install the app. Here apple is making that decision for me.