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Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

ericmigi.com

441–450 of 1001 posts

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#441
post #430

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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…

As a user, I am totally fine with Apple restricting access to iMessage. In fact, now that I read this, I want them to do this, thanks Apple.

You can thank Apple for the Lightning connector and App Store too, for all the good it does everyone in the EU. If a company uses their power to prevent competition with their own products or services, the market's jurisdiction reserves the right to restore competition to their market and prevent the harms inherent to monopoly abuse.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#442
post #364
post #216

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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.

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.

Because with iMessage, it's not about your own security, it's about the security of everybody that you're allowed to message from a given device.

I suspect Apple can significantly cut down on abuse prevention measures just by making it harder to automatically send iMessage spam.

If any random Bluetooth smartwatch was allowed to send those, there's no telling how that capability could be abused, we all know how IoT vendors are with device security.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#444
post #188

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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 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…

Eric did exactly what you suggest, and found out he can't really build it without permission from the manufacturer. So no, you can't just pull up the pants.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#445

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I don't see how you can be a monopoly with <30% market share.

You don't see how you can be a monopoly with nearly 2/3 market share and 2.5x market size of your next-largest competitor? You must not be very imaginative

Some other companies with similar market share:

  - Coca Cola
  - DoorDash
  - Adobe
  - Tesla
  - Canon digital cameras
I guess we should break all them up too.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#446
post #381
post #352

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If Apple had their way, they would LOVE to sell you a $2000 aluminum brick with no screen, speakers, microphone, etc., that still required a proprietary cable to charge.

Why would you charge an aluminum brick?

Because it refused to become the 51st state.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#447

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…

That's not the "contra", you've just fallen for Apple's PR.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#448
post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a user, I am totally fine with Apple restricting access to iMessage. In fact, now that I read this, I want them to do this, thanks Apple.

You can thank Apple for the Lightning connector and App Store too, for all the good it does everyone in the EU. If a company uses their power to prevent competition with their own products or services, the market's jurisdiction reserves the right to restore competition to their market and prevent the harms inherent to monopoly abuse.

I probably dont get your sarcasm. But I never had a problem with Lightning. In the long run, I like the switch to USB-C... But when I got my first iPhone, USB-C wasn't invented yet, so... Also, I like the AppStore for its reviews, and would actually NEVER activate an alternative appstore. No need to weaken my security on purpose. I know, its apparently an unpopular opinion here, but that is mostly because many people only comment with their dev hats on and are apparently unable to see things from user perspectives...

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple is not a market on their own from the perspective of smart phones and watches. Apple actually acts as a gatekeeper to the smart watch market when used with their devices, because they provide core platform services as a gateway for these products to operate and communicate with end-users, but define rules and restrictions which don't apply for Apple smart watches themselves. > Apple is its own market from the…

> But isn't that's the case Pebble is making here? No, the case they are making is that Apple is making things worse for Apple users. They haven't done anything to effect the Android watch experience. > They create a market They didn't create a market in this case. They created a product, which is the Apple Watch. > Apple actually acts as a gatekeeper to the smart watch market when used with their devices Wrong- they…

> They didn't create a market in this case. They created a product, which is the Apple Watch.

I think this is the biggest disagreement point between you and the other poster. Whether it constitutes a new market is up for debate, but one can definitely argue that hardware and software that interfaces with iOS devices can be considered a market in and of itself, considering that there are literal billions of iOS devices worldwide.

It would be one thing if iOS was a limited-scope, standalone product. But it's not - a large portion of its value comes from working in conjunction with other, non-Apple software (and to a certain extent, hardware).

Now, in this segment, it's undeniable that Apple has constructed a web of their own solutions over iOS, and consistently gives themselves preferential treatment to ensure that other products have limited, if any, functionality.

This is certainly legal right now, at least in the US. But I don't think it's right or that it serves the consumers' interests. It's very similar to manufacturers of all sorts of physical devices freaking out about third-party repairs, parts, modifications and so on. It even has all the same marketing points about how anything without the explicit megacorp blessing is automatically tainted and unsafe, regardless of what it is.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sure didn't know QuickTime Player could read my screen or listen to my microphone...

I guess that's fair, because the name says Player. But still, the way to not use those features is to not use those features. Unlike a third party app you don't need to worry about it trying to read your screen if you haven't explicitly started a screen recording. If you can't trust Apple to do that then you can't trust Apple to block third party apps from recording, either.

Security boundaries are for more than intentionally bad apps, but things like bugs causing code execution or other ways of abusing their privileged position.

An app decoding complex untrusted media files from the internet? It should have the absolute minimum permissions.

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