Earlier quoted context omitted.
The APIs already exist...
Then what’s the post complaining about? Just use the API!
You obviously know that's not possible. They are private APIs kept for Apple's ecosystem lock-in.
Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones
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Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones
#412I 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.
There are many anti competitive practices that Apple and Microsoft engage in. And a lot of it is not even “preventing” something but just bogging it down so it takes a lot of time and money and starves out anyone who could challenge them.
But we should also talk about the inverse thing where they give themselves an advantage in positive ways. Like for example, iOS devices will regularly advertise Apple’s own Siri intelligence or their own games subscription or news subscription or iCloud or whatever. These get special treatment and show up in unexpected ways - notifications that you cannot prevent ahead of time or in your system menu with an annoying badge you cannot dismiss until you click the thing. These are things Apple only does does THEIR OWN products and services. It gives them an anti competitive advantage against others, but it does so not by crippling others but by boosting themselves.
All of this should be illegal. I dislike regulations sometimes, for example when EU regulation gets into censorship. But they seem to be doing a lot more to help customers and support competition than the US. While Trump talked a lot about breaking up big tech, I am skeptical as to whether he’ll do anything to actually support competition and actual free markets. It will require regulation, not posturing.
Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones
#413Earlier quoted context omitted.
You do realize this is a very infantilizing attitude? Why can't the end user choose its own level of security vs usability? Letting a corporation decide this for all users is just creating a nanny state in different clothing.
I tend to agree with this, but if you look at the PC ecosystem, you'll see that 'leave users to figure out their own security' is a shit show. Phones, for better or worse, contain much more private and personal information about users than their computer I would bet on average. So I understand the urge to make phones more secure by default and to help users avoid foot guns, even if it means restricting their choices.…
Without that "shit show" you would never end up with devices like iPhones and useful software that drove last decades of innovation and progress.
The ability to build better things is the reason why you can now sit here, using technologies built on that "shit show" machine, and bloviate how new generations aren't allowed to build new things anymore because a megacorp needs to feed its greed.
Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones
#414I 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 t…
Wouldn't "see my text messages on my watch" be included in "works pretty well?"
Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones
#415Earlier quoted context omitted.
This has never happened.
Not explicitly (because that might be too openly anti-competitive even for Apple) but Apple refused to allow f.lux into the App Store, and it had to be sideloaded - and Apple leaned on them to stop offering that. When Apple did offer Night Shift in iOS 9.3 it made the APIs to do this Apple-only, for ... reasons. As of today, no non-Apple app can modify color temperature of the display.
Not allowing third party apps to adjust screen colors seems like a reasonable security boundary to me. For the most part when you close an app on iOS, it gets closed. It doesnt get to keep changing system settings in the background. Would be awful if in addition to notifications, apps also got to adjust your colors.
Screen tinting like that is exactly the kind of thing that should be an OS-feature, not an app feature.
They are similarly quite restrictive on MacOS, with some system-impacting features being locked behind “accessibility” permissions. So that arbitrary apps can’t interact with other apps unless they are actually doing something that needs it like “being a screen reader”.
iOS doesn’t have the same sort of permissions. Apps can’t take over interactions with other apps, or change display settings, etc. This is a security boundary. And changing that specifically for “changing screen colors” seems unnecessary to me.
Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones
#416Earlier quoted context omitted.
Couldn't you make that argument for literally any anticompetitive practice? Like in the 1990s: "Microsoft isn't making an OS for people that want to try different browsers"
Making your own products interoperate better than competitors' products is pretty typical and I don't think it rises to the level of "anticompetitive practice." If you don't like it (and I can totally understand why), there are numerous other smartphone makers out there with products that allow better integration with these watches and you're free to buy one. MS didn't get into trouble because they went after competi…
Microsoft absolutely got in trouble for purposefully making other Office suites not work correctly on Windows, for using private Windows APIs in Office that other companies didn't have access to, etc.
If Apple makes a watch that can receive and send iMessages then there is no reason any other device shouldn't be able to use the same APIs that Apple uses.
It absolutely creates a system where competitors literally cannot compete with the same features.
Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Other then being lazy, which is totally ok. It's not OK. This collective laziness and convenience is our number one enemy. People don't want to be responsible, they want some corporation to manage everything so they don't have to think about stuff. We need more people to take responsibility and use Linux and free software and hardware. Owning the computing system means being responsible for it, and we need to get p…
This is such an incredibly HN take. What are you seeing in the world that would led you to think the average Joe can use Linux without someone like us supporting them? Maybe not day to day but they are absolutely going to run into pain points like “Netflix is low quality” or “I need to install this windows app for this new gizmo I bought”. It’s a fantasy world that Linux desktop is good enough for most people, it jus…
It’s not a fantasy, we were there at some point and we deliberately moved from it.
When Unix was the norm, everyday employees knew how to navigate a shell. In highschool I had a friend working at the bank. You know what she did all day? Ran SQL queries to make reports. No degree. She wasn’t a programmer. She was a financial analyst.
Now we have people constructing database systems in an excel workbook on a share drive somewhere, but even that’s fading. Now we have people creating systems in Discord and spending 20 hours a week moving data from point A to point B. Tasks that someone 20 years ago could trivially automate. They don’t know how anymore.
We have lawyers paying 20 paralegals to maintain and consolidate a document shared between 10 parties with 50 revisions floating around. We’ve had version control for decades. They refuse to learn. They would rather spend the enormous amounts of man hours doing what is essentially manual labor.
It’s clear that computers are a huge part of our lives. You can learn to use them or you can burn hours - but you can’t opt out.
I mean, Jesus Christ kids these days don’t know what a directory is. We had a short window of computer literate everyday people and then poof! Gone! But the need for computers is still here. And we can’t quite talk to them and tell them what to do yet.
Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones
#418Earlier quoted context omitted.
Couldn't you make that argument for literally any anticompetitive practice? Like in the 1990s: "Microsoft isn't making an OS for people that want to try different browsers"
Not any anticompetitive practice, just the ones that allow in competitors who have different security models for human/computer interaction. Imagine if you could swap out Siri for Alexa. The privacy guarantees are nothing alike. People buy iPhones because they prohibit unsafe choices.
Source? What data do you have that "prohits unsafe choices" is the only or #1 reason that people buy an iPhone over an Android?
Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones
#419Earlier quoted context omitted.
You do realize this is a very infantilizing attitude? Why can't the end user choose its own level of security vs usability? Letting a corporation decide this for all users is just creating a nanny state in different clothing.
Why can't people choose which prescription drugs they want to use?
They should be able to.
Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones
#420Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another company that would like Apple to not expose functionality to their first-party ecosystem and refuse to expose it to third parties even with user consent. If the functionality isn't available to anyone , fine, so be it. If the functionality exists on the Apple Watch, it should be done through an API.
Surprised there are professional developers who seem to be clueless about the vast difference in the cost of developing 3p API versus internal only functions. The basic difference between public and private has been captured in language design for decades now.
I'm well aware of the cost difference, but the cost of internal-only functions is potentially measured in antitrust actions.
Microsoft, post-antitrust action, made a very careful point of ensuring new functionality in first-party products like Office only used things that had public APIs.