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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

#211

Post by TMWNN »

As I wrote on Reddit https://np.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/1jea1k6/apple_restric...> to someone else critiquing the post:

----

> he’s going to opine about how Apple is “anti-competitive,” and “evil,”

Complete with obligatory Trump mention.

I haven't owned a Pebble but have long heard how nice they are. That said, this is wrong:

>It’s impossible for a 3rd party smartwatch to send text messages, or perform actions on notifications (like dismissing, muting, replying) and many, many other things.

My Amazfit Balance lets me dismiss iOS notifications. I don't know how Amazfit's Zepp app enables this functionality; all I know is that it works.

Its integration with iOS is not ideal or complete; for example, although I can take and make phone calls with its mic and speaker, I can't talk to Siri through it despite my ancient $20 running headset being able to do so. But Balance's other advantages are more than enough for me to go with it over an Apple Watch.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#212

Post by mceachen »

eddythompson80 wrote: post #208
mceachen wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

s/cap/crap/?

Or they mean cap as 'lie' in genz speak. 'No cap' = 'No lie'. in a sentence "I saw an alligator today. No cap"

Thanks for translating. I’ve never heard cap used in the affirmative.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#213

Post by Spivak »

ch4s3 wrote: post #198
lelandbatey wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean the results of the lawsuits are it kinda is. You don't have to open it up technologically in the sense that just anyone ole' device can just pair but you should have to give any OEM access that wants to be part of the secure hardware club— they get to use the proprietary bits for interoperability.

Any smart watch vendor should be able to call up Apple and make their own watch which is equally privileged to Apple's. And the requirements to the vendor to do so needs to be not so onerous as to be an effective ban.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#214

Post by TMWNN »

Lio wrote: post #210
film42 wrote: post #13

iOS wearable integrations are bad, but somehow Meta Ray-Bans are very good. Voice assist to start a call, send a text, read a notification, etc. Did Meta get special access to do this?

For voice integration, you can just provide a bluetooth microphone on you device and have it access Siri. Garmin have tried the same strategy on some of their watches. What you can't do is reply to a text without using voice, which is what I'd like.

>For voice integration, you can just provide a bluetooth microphone on you device and have it access Siri. Garmin have tried the same strategy on some of their watches.

Interesting. This indicates that the inability for my Amazfit Balance to do this is indeed an artificial limitation, and not something that Apple prevents. https://np.reddit.com/r/amazfit/comments/1j3ftbr/why_cant_ba...>

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#215

Post by commakozzi »

presbyterian wrote: post #118
kelnos wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GGP mentions "user experience" being "infinitely better". I don't think Android being made by an advertising company has much if anything to do with it. I also don't see iOS and Android having much of a usability gap. At this point, they have very similar feature sets, and the UX is fairly well-polished, even on Android -- where yes, it took them a lot longer to get there. For the most part, if you think that either…

> iPhone users are there mainly because they've always been there, and there's fairly strong lock-in and switching costs Or perhaps it's because we like iPhones?

shocker huh? After owning a few iPhones since 2007, I used and developed for Android for years after release in 2010. I despise it. I switched BACK to iPhone and fully embraced the ecosystem years ago (macOS, iOS, ipadOS) and haven't regretted one second of it. I AM an apple fan boy. Why? because i love using my devices and working within this ecosystem a hundred times more than any other options available. The anti-Apple cult is obnoxious. Just don't use them if you don't like them.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#216

Post by Retric »

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…

Every device you let in is another attack surface, and no certification process can eliminate it.

Allowing devices to view and respond to messages is inherently lower risk than allowing them to freely communicate with anyone.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#217

Post by rapind »

eddythompson80 wrote: post #208
mceachen wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

s/cap/crap/?

Or they mean cap as 'lie' in genz speak. 'No cap' = 'No lie'. in a sentence "I saw an alligator today. No cap"

No cap, I did see an alligator two days ago on the golf course. There were a lot of abandoned balls around her (water trap).

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#218

Post by enragedcacti »

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…

> your complaint is not in Apple's behavior, but your regret that the competition sucks and it's not Apple's fault

Apple uses their dominant position in the smartphone market to exert leverage over the smartwatch market and block other companies' access to a huge chunk of potential smartwatch buyers. Reduced addressable market->reduced potential returns->reduced investment->worse products for everyone.

This same pattern hurts Apple users as well because Apple can reduce their investment, increase prices, or both, without worrying about being beaten on quality or price.

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

This statement would be true if iPhone had 0.1% or 99.9% marketshare and is on its own irrelevant to whether or not it should be regulated. The whole point of regulating companies with dominant market positions is that they have tools to force customers into sub-optimal outcomes regardless of whether or not the customer recognizes it beforehand.

> If Apple did something anticompetitive to keep Android options from being good, then you probably have a winnable legal case. But it seems like Google, Samsung, and the other Android players are losing on their own merits.

This ignores the dozens of Smartwatch companies that don't have a smartphone business to integrate with. In your view, what should Garmin have done if the major Android players blocked 3rd party feature parity from the beginning along with Apple? Would Garmin need to make their own smartphone and OS to compete for watch sales, or would their product just not exist? Would that be good or bad for the industry?

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#219

Post by lern_too_spel »

judofyr wrote: post #203
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yes? Imagine a bug where iMessages are leaked over Bluetooth when a user has installed an application that integrates with some watch brand. Bring this to an airport and you can steal hundreds/thousands of messages from a wide range of people. That’s widely different attack vector than targeting macOS. That said, I don’t see why Apple can’t provide toolkit/certification that will make it safe to communicate over Blue…

Bluetooth is encrypted.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#220

Post by bhelkey »

rahkiin wrote: post #122
dcchambers wrote: post #78

Stuff like this is the reason iOS/iPadOS will never be serious general purpose computing platforms.

Which they never advertised it to be. Nor is my toaster and my oven or my xbox

~70% of the 8 billion people in this world use a smartphone [1]. It is the primary computer for a huge percentage of these people [2].

Comparing mobile phones to toasters, ovens and gaming consoles is disingenuous.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/203734/global-smartphone...

[2] https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mob...

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