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Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

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Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#191

Post by chamanbuga »

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…

This is cap. I worked on heads up glasses, and one of our issues was the lack of integration with Apple's iMessage ecosystem. Device makers are willing to go through several security measures, like deploying the MFi chips and certification. However, at best this gives you access to the notification system, not iMessage itself. You are able to respond to messages via the notification framework, but not integrate directly with iMessage even after taking all security and certification efforts. This isn't a security play. This is a walled garden play.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#192

Post by rickdeckard »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #140
rickdeckard wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is more, where is that 'force' expected to come from which should make them change their way? Just hopes and prayers?

The issue is, suppose you want a phone with A, B, C, D and E. In a competitive market, there are a hundred phone OEMs providing every combination of those things for various prices with various trade offs etc. In a duopoly, there is one company providing A, another providing B and C, and nobody providing D or E. If you chose the company providing B and C, but you still want A, D and E, what are you supposed to do? Re…

What you need is REGULATION, because the market is already too skewed for new entrants to meet a level playing field.

But yeah...not a popular opinion here, I know...

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#193

Post by ch4s3 »

sunshowers wrote: post #155
ch4s3 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wi…

Do people expect a computer company to love them individually?

> Apple uses its robust security infrastructure to prioritize media company DRM over users' interests

You mean they follow the law so that they don't get sued into the ground?

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#194

Post by sroussey »

tacker2000 wrote: post #65

Similar thing is going on with the Spotify Apple Watch app, probably so that people migrate to Apple Music... see this discussion, for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/AppleWatch/comments/1h6qmrw/spotify...

I dunno, I use the spotify apple watch app just fine

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#195

Post by ch4s3 »

Propelloni wrote: post #185
avgDev wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apple is obviously the vendor for people who like to have their hands held. If you don't like that, make your decision earlier, just don't buy Apple. Worked for me the last decade.

I'm happy for them to hold my hand on commodity electronics. I don't ever want to have to think about how my phone and headphones work. I like to fiddle with computers, but not the stuff I need to run my day to day life.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#196

Post by Lio »

ch4s3 wrote: post #131
distrill wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am aware that apple blocks certain functionality to maintain a cohesive and secure experience. It is THE reason I buy their products, I want the curation. Otherwise I'd buy an android device.

> I am aware that apple blocks certain functionality to maintain a cohesive and secure experience.

The argument is that they don't do it to maintain a secure experience but to stop competitors having feature parity with their products.

Personally, I find it annoying that my Garmin watch cannot reply to text messages on my iPhone.

I also find it annoying that my iPhone nags me to cut access to my watch to stop it getting weather updates. It doesn't even nag me the once but repeatedly.

It would be one thing if Apple even competed on features with Garmin but they don't.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#197

Post by sunshowers »

ch4s3 wrote: post #193
sunshowers wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wi…

Do people expect a computer company to love them individually? > Apple uses its robust security infrastructure to prioritize media company DRM over users' interests You mean they follow the law so that they don't get sued into the ground?

> Do people expect a computer company to love them individually?

I expect corporations to be honest and sincere, and present the full argument for why they're doing what they're doing. I don't know if "people" in general expect this, but if they don't, then their expectations are too low.

I am quite sure there is no US law which says Apple must build out support for media company DRM. Linux doesn't support it and hasn't been declared illegal.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#198

Post by ch4s3 »

lelandbatey wrote: post #189
ch4s3 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hobbling is a weird way to say that they aren't privileging unknown hardware. Yes, they make their own peripherals work better together. This seems like the only way to do some of what they do, airpods are so good because they use a proprietary standard that is better than bluetooth, using the open standard would be worse. My point is that it is good that they focus on making their own products work well together, it…

That's not good enough. If you're Apple, and you're worth 3 trillion dollars, you can both do security and behave in a way that isn't anti-competitive. They could interoperate securely. Is it easier to just lock out your competition and use proprietary everything? Yes, duh. It's also blatantly anti-competitive, which is a thing that societally and (arguably) morally is not acceptable. I hope to read this blog post in…

It isn't anti-competitive to not open up your hardware and software security stack to any other OEMs who wander by. You can simply just buy a competitor's product, for less money even.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#199

Post by kelnos »

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…

> 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.

No it's not; GP didn't even address this. Competition sucks, and that is Apple's (and Google's) fault.

> Most people choose to buy iPhones knowing that only certain watch options work.

I'm sure that's not true. Most people choose to buy an iPhone because it's an iPhone. No one is going to buy an iPhone because Apple Watch works and Garmin watches don't work (as well).

Certainly some people buy an iPhone because they also want to buy an Apple Watch (which I assume doesn't really work well or at all with Android), but I think that's a minority of purchasers. They by an iPhone because of the iPhone itself.

> It's not like Apple started off letting third party watches work well and then suddenly locked them out (but you could argue from the article that they started off with minor handicaps and have increased the level of handicap over the years).

I feel like your parenthetical refutes any point you were trying to make in the prior sentence. The first part of your sentence is irrelevant. While it does take work to standardize public APIs, it also takes work to lock things down and choose what subset of functions third parties are allowed to access. The fact of crippling third-party smartwatch access is anti-competitive behavior.

This is the same shit we went through in the 90s with Microsoft, but many people here are too young to remember what that was like. MS gave their own apps (Office, IE, etc.) access to private, undocumented Windows APIs that let them provide a better experience than similar third-party apps could provide. The US government and courts decided that was illegal. It should be illegal for Apple to do so as well. (And before you start quoting relative market share numbers between MS in the 90s and Apple now, I don't think that's relevant. You shouldn't need a monopoly in order to be restricted from anti-competitive behavior.)

> But it seems like Google, Samsung, and the other Android players are losing on their own merits.

That's a naive explanation for complex social phenomena. Android doesn't suck. It's fine. Very good even. But it's not enough to be good, or even excellent in today's markets. You need incumbency, lock-in, social capital, and, yes... anti-competitive behavior.

And to be clear, Android manufacturers are not losing. In most places outside the US, Android is the dominant operating system.

But! This isn't about Android winning or losing. It's not about Android at all. It's about companies like Pebble and Garmin being hobbled in the iOS smartwatch market because of Apple's anti-competitive practices. Android is irrelevant to this.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#200

Post by mceachen »

chamanbuga wrote: post #191
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…

This is cap. I worked on heads up glasses, and one of our issues was the lack of integration with Apple's iMessage ecosystem. Device makers are willing to go through several security measures, like deploying the MFi chips and certification. However, at best this gives you access to the notification system, not iMessage itself. You are able to respond to messages via the notification framework, but not integrate direc…

s/cap/crap/?
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