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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

#261

Post by cheeseomlit »

bradleybuda wrote: post #102
echelon wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ONLY answer is antitrust action from every major government. The trillion dollar companies are so massive that they are impinging upon every category of business that touches them. And they're so massive that their sinnew and tendrils touch everything under the sun. Mobile computing is de-facto owned by two companies. It's owned, tightly controlled like an authoritarian government, and heavily taxed. Compared wit…

If you don't like an iPhone, don't buy an iPhone. Don't legislate your consumer preferences on me.

I don't, and I won't, but that doesn't really address the points in that post. There is nothing any individual can do about massive corporate cartels controlling entire industries and strangling all potential competition in the cradle, like they said anti-trust enforcement is the only way. But apparently it'll be difficult to garner support for that when people perceive it as an attack on their 'consumer preferences'

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#264

Post by 9rx »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #254
9rx wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what are you supposed to do? Reward the company providing even less of what you want? Assuming it isn't regulation (e.g. patents) getting in the way, you pull up your pants and produce [A, D, and E]. If that's too rich for your blood, I suppose rewarding the company that got you something close enough at a tiny fraction of the cost is reasonable. It is hard to deny the value in that. > What you need is more competi…

The question is, why is it so infeasible to enter the market? In theory it should be possible for someone to do this. Phones are made of modular parts. Some companies make chips, some make screens, some make operating systems, some make app stores, so you go acquire each of the parts, make your modifications and start selling your phone. First problem, the best phone chips are made by Apple and they won't sell them t…

> The question is, why is it so infeasible to enter the market?

It is capital intensive, so that is a hurdle, but capital isn't that hard to come by if you are doing something compelling. It was downright easy in the 2010s.

Regulation is the biggest problem. It is straight up against the law to become a direct competitor in computing. Even with all the necessary resources, just try to build an iPhone clone, but with the addition of Y, and see how long you can go before lawyers start breathing down your neck. If you make the first day, I'll be impressed.

You can try to compete indirectly with something kind of the same but different enough to skirt the laws, but that's rarely what the market wants, making it difficult to justify the effort and capital utilization. You need something truly game changing to consider venturing down that road.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#265

Post by conradev »

Reminds me of the time I wrote a jailbreak tweak for iPhone to send more types of notifications to Pebble back in 2013:

https://www.engadget.com/2013-02-14-hack-brings-all-iphone-n...

https://github.com/conradev/btnotificationenabler

This has been a problem for a long time.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#266

Post by jmb99 »

avgDev wrote: post #160
ch4s3 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> As a customer I would like to be able to make that decision.

You can. There are dozens (hundreds?) of phones you can buy that aren’t an iPhone. It’s been well known for nearly 20 years at this point that iPhones are more closed than the competition (of which, again, there is a lot). They are successful because of this, not in spite of it, contrary to internet belief.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#267

Post by AnthonyMouse »

rickdeckard wrote: post #192
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

"Regulation" is a dirty word because most regulations are written by captured regulators. The last thing you want is new rules that permanently entrench the incumbent duopoly while pretending that you can tame Godzilla to keep as a pet if only the right chains are used.

You need rules that restore actual competition. Accept no substitute.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#268

Post by Nifty3929 »

I think people forget that Apple is not making devices for the Hackernews community. They are making devices for people that just want something that works pretty well and has reasonable security - even to the extent of protecting them from themselves. They have other things to do with their time than learn about security vulnerabilities and how to avoid them. They want to just click 'yes' on every popup and expect things to keep working. Because they know that they are not qualified to answer that yes/no popup question. And those people do not care much about lock-in and walled gardens. They are not interested in jailbreaking and sideloading apps. They've never heard of Pebble or have any interest in it.

This is 90% of humanity, including people we all know and love.

Apple serves these people pretty well.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#269

Post by parsimo2010 »

kelnos wrote: post #199
parsimo2010 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>GP didn't even address this

Yes they did, when they said they were amazed that Apple dodged anti-trust lawsuits. I said that from the rest of their post it seemed like they acknowledged that competition existed, they just didn't want to use Android options. The legitimate anti-trust example they gave (LTT/Floatplane) is from an app developer perspective (not a smart phone and watch buyer), which is why I talked about that.

> 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).

I didn't say that people buy iPhones because other watch brands don't work well, I said that they buy iPhones knowing that the other watch brands didn't work, and it still doesn't deter them. But they had the information available when they made their choice.

> I feel like your parenthetical refutes any point you were trying to make in the prior sentence.

No, I said it's not like they totally changed course from being welcoming to other brands to locking them out. They were always hostile to other smartwatch makers, but I acknowledged that the article mentions that they may have gotten more hostile in recent years. Acknowledging that their hostility may exist on a spectrum doesn't refute the point that they've always been hostile to other smartwatch brands. I love that in your next paragraph you include a parenthetical that could refute your own argument though- market share is absolutely relevant. Nobody is going to bother suing a small fry over anti-competitive behavior with 0.01% market share in a healthy competitive market- the market takes care of that issue on its own.

> Android doesn't suck. It's fine. Very good even. ... It's not about Android at all

This article is partly about Android since "Apple is being restrictive" is in comparison to features that the Android API offers. They are saying that they are going to make an Apple app for the Pebble but it is not going to be as good as the Android experience.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#270

Post by modeless »

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…

Apple makes a mockery of their own "security promises" for iMessage by not end-to-end encrypting iMessages in iCloud by default. Ridiculous to use that as a justification to prevent users from choosing to send their messages to watches that happen to be made by someone other than Apple.
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