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iOS 26.3 brings AirPods-like pairing to third-party devices in EU under DMA

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211–220 of 352 posts

Re: iOS 26.3 brings AirPods-like pairing to third-party devices in EU under DMA

#211
post #36

I have no doubt that Gruber will find reasons why the EU is bad and regulation is bad. At this point it's rather amusing how Daring Fireball (and many other American media) rants against regulation, and in another post complains about how companies exploit users. Regulation is unfortunately necessary: the market isn't as magical as we would like it to be and competition is not a magic wand that makes everything good…

Who is this Gruber? Searching ddg just brings up this post.

Unless you mean ol' Hans Gruber. He is quite the villain.

Re: iOS 26.3 brings AirPods-like pairing to third-party devices in EU under DMA

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, with CallKit’s existence I would have assumed any app using CallKit would work on Watch…

Unfortunately, it doesn't work like that. Third-party app calls don't go to the Watch. It's so annoying, I have to tell people to call me using regular phone calls or FaceTime instead of using Signal or WhatsApp because I always miss the latter ones.

Seems like this has changed?

Re: iOS 26.3 brings AirPods-like pairing to third-party devices in EU under DMA

#213
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can stop music on my phone and immediately listen to music from my laptop. I have non-apple headphones, a non-apple laptop and an iPhone. There is no apple magic dust that makes this happen.

Can you do that with 7 devices? Can you pair your device with your phone and it automatically pairs with all of your devices?

[deleted]

Re: iOS 26.3 brings AirPods-like pairing to third-party devices in EU under DMA

#214
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can headphones that stick to the spec actually play nicely with multiple devices? - switching quickly between phone and laptop like Airpods do?

Yes, this is called Bluetooth multipoint and has been common on non-Apple devices (for example Bose) for a few years now. Requires no logins and is vendor-agnostic.

It's finnicky though. Sometimes, if I get a call on my phone and hang up, my Bose headphones tell my Mac to start playing music.

Re: iOS 26.3 brings AirPods-like pairing to third-party devices in EU under DMA

#215

Currently, on the AirPods side and not iOS side like the article covers, Apple breaks Bluetooth feature parity with other devices by not sticking to the Bluetooth spec with AirPods themselves. For example, you need to root and patch your Bluetooth stack on your phone if you want to use all of your AirPods features on Android, and not because Android is doing something wrong, it's because the Android Bluetooth stack a…

They do this on purpose if you didn't get it. Google will never "fix" this issue because they follow the spec. They shouldn't have to add an exception for AirPods.

Guess the users suffer.

Re: iOS 26.3 brings AirPods-like pairing to third-party devices in EU under DMA

#216
post #207
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can accept calls on the watch from Telegram. So this sounds like a “whatsapp didn’t want to do it” more than a “Apple disallowed it”

Most probably. WhatsApp is also still using the old way of accessing photos where you have to define which photos WA has access to every time you want to share newly taken photos. I’m pretty sure they do that deliberately so you get annoyed and give them blanket access to all your photos. (Which they then probably secretly analyse in the background.)

I wish apple would deprecate the old way and force apps to adopt the new photo picker.

Re: iOS 26.3 brings AirPods-like pairing to third-party devices in EU under DMA

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Still don't get your point. How can the failures to innovate from privates companies be the responsibility of a political union of different governments?

EU regulations strangle corporate innovation there

Re: iOS 26.3 brings AirPods-like pairing to third-party devices in EU under DMA

#218
post #202
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet if you want applications to work on your phone, many times you'll need approval from either Apple or Google. Google can effectively ban manufacturers (like they did with Huawei) from using "Android" by blacklisting them from Play Services. Apple owns the entire ecosystem and prevents third-party from having access to the same feature set.

Something tells me that the thing about Google not allowing custom Andriod operating systems to install apps is not quite true. I don't know about this specific topic yet, but I bet that if I look into it, I'll find out that there's nuance here that isn't been correctly portrayed by your comment.

You need to allow Play the play store and it's services and those will wall you in. Many times discussed here: many banking, gov, health apps around the world are banning anything not blessed by Google or Apple and installing on a non blessed system will not allow you to use them. My bank allows a modern and supported android or ios phone or a Windows laptop with a biometric card reader. Pretty much locked in and all banks are following.

Re: iOS 26.3 brings AirPods-like pairing to third-party devices in EU under DMA

#219
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe because they are the only organisation able to act against the massive (foreign, if it is anything tech related for a European) corporate entities nowadays.

Okay, so someone acting against something big and foreign is good? Why?

If they are not playing with local laws, then yes.

Re: iOS 26.3 brings AirPods-like pairing to third-party devices in EU under DMA

#220
post #9

Three months ago a commenter here on HN claimed to me that this will be bad for Apple users: > There is simply no good way to make the API public while maintaining the performance and quality expectations that Apple consumers have. If the third party device doesn’t work people will blame Apple even though it’s not their fault. And, competition probably can’t build for it anyway: > It’s impossible to build Apple Silic…

Apple can't perform well with audio on Apple Silicon, either. In 2025 macos is the only OS with audio cracking appearing with CPU load. Even Linux is better

That drives me nuts. It happens more in my AirPod pros and gen 4 AirPods.
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