Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#541

Post by guelo » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 9:43 PM UTC

snailmailman wrote: post #397

rickdeckard wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conveniently, Apple's App Store Review Guidelines also include several rules that restrict apps from duplicating features that the OS already provides. So if they detect a trend early enough, they implement it as first-party feature, dry out the existing competitors while restricting new competitors to enter based on the App Store Review...

I’m pretty sure this rule is only there to stop the hundreds of “flashlight” apps that used to exist. (Although, they appear to still exist) There isn’t tons of innovation or competition in “flashlight app” other than adding advertisements. There used to be a bunch of them that would only get popular out of necessity. The ones I’m seeing now in the App Store do seem to have non-default behaviors like “strobe light” a…

Flashlight apps were a 3rd party innovation. Apple didn't originally realize that the camera's light could be used that way. I wonder how many other useful features don't exist today because of Apple/Google's greed prevent a truly free smartphone market.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#542

Post by mulderc » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 9:44 PM UTC

Majromax wrote: post #272

mulderc wrote: post #202

I guess I don't see why Pebble, or any smart watch, should need a phone at all. The watch should be able to connect to wifi and/or cellular by itself. We should be able to run full apps on the watch itself.

Battery life. Radios are energy-intensive, and the processing required to run "full apps" is also often pretty steep. In the meantime, while battery chemistries are getting better space is very much at a premium on one's wrist. From the other recently-posted article, the new Pebble watches are targeting 30-day battery lives between charges. That would be unthinkable for a watch that manages its own wifi/cellular conn…

I had a pebble and the limitations of the device drove me insane. I don't care if my smart watch has 30 days of battery, I care about what it does and that I can do the things I want to do on it. The Apple watch has wifi and celluar and I can do tons of things on it without my phone around. Many of the apps I use have essentially full apps on device which allows me a lot more freedom from my phone and flexibility with my watch.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#543

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 9:45 PM UTC

sunaookami wrote: post #169

rpdillon wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key criticism is the final step. They don't only duplicate the functionality. They then ban the original implementation from their stores because it can create "customer confusion".

This has never happened.

[deleted]

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#544

Post by mulderc » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 9:46 PM UTC

bhelkey wrote: post #276

mulderc wrote: post #202

I guess I don't see why Pebble, or any smart watch, should need a phone at all. The watch should be able to connect to wifi and/or cellular by itself. We should be able to run full apps on the watch itself.

Two reasons: One, adding hardware to connect to WiFi and cellular increases size and power requirements. Notably, the new Pebble 's battery is projected to last 30 days. Two, people use phones. They want their watch to work with their phone instead of around it.

WiFi and Cellular are avialble on the smallest of apple watches. I don't care if my smartwatch can go 30 days between a charge, none of that matters if it can't do what I want it to do. I had a pebble back in the day and I thought it was useless as it was such a limited device and it sounds like they want to replicate that experience. I'm happy the people that want such a device are getting it, but I don't get the appeal and want a device that can do thing.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#545

Post by xfz » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 9:46 PM UTC

This is why the only Apple device I'll buy is a MacBook Pro, and even then if they wall it off as badly as their other products I'll reconsider.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#546

Post by NotPractical » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 9:47 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #538

rednafi wrote: post #139

There's nothing new here. From AirDrop to AirPods, Apple's MO is to lock you into their ecosystem and be as belligerent as possible toward any non-Apple gizmo. Couple that with social and network effects, and you have a perfect formula for monopolizing a market without continuously improving the tech.

> and you have a perfect formula for monopolizing a market without continuously improving the tech. ...but the Apple ecosystem has the best tech. M chips, AirPods Pro, Apple Watch, iPad, Pencil, I mean the tech is great . Apple isn't monopolizing anything. They're competing like hell and winning because their tech is best. The real question is why the Android and Microsoft ecosystems don't do better at improving thei…

> ...but the Apple ecosystem has the best tech

You aren't in any position to make that call, since you have no opportunity to try competing products due to being locked in to an anticompetitive ecosystem. European iOS users will soon be able to decide if Apple really does have the best tech or not.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#547

Post by badc0ffee » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 9:47 PM UTC

kimixa wrote: post #450

badc0ffee wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not the problem Apple was trying to solve here.

I suppose I could see a system where every camera/screen recording access by QuickTime Player forces a popup, because you can't say whether it happened intentionally or due to opening a malicious video file, but that would have to be opt-in for sure.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#548

Post by timwis » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 9:47 PM UTC

I degoogled my life out of principle—that one was about privacy. I feel strongly about this one too (in fact I just migrated from kindle to kobo for similar reasons), but where else is there to go? Some rooted android phone with Google play services disabled, where lots of apps aren't available and it's a struggle to get everything to work? (Genuine question!)

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#549

Post by crazygringo » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 9:48 PM UTC

NotPractical wrote: post #546

crazygringo wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and you have a perfect formula for monopolizing a market without continuously improving the tech. ...but the Apple ecosystem has the best tech. M chips, AirPods Pro, Apple Watch, iPad, Pencil, I mean the tech is great . Apple isn't monopolizing anything. They're competing like hell and winning because their tech is best. The real question is why the Android and Microsoft ecosystems don't do better at improving thei…

> ...but the Apple ecosystem has the best tech You aren't in any position to make that call, since you have no opportunity to try competing products due to being locked in to an anticompetitive ecosystem. European iOS users will soon be able to decide if Apple really does have the best tech or not.

What are you talking about? I can try all the competing products compatible with Android and Windows. I'm not locked into anything Apple because they're not a monopoly. I am very much in a position to "make that call".

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#550

Post by croes » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 9:51 PM UTC

dmitrygr wrote: post #167

croes wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where is the part where you can reply to a message?

OP said “ cannot do A or B”. I demonstrated how to do B, proving the original statement to be a lie. The fact that you still cannot do A irrelevant. Hyperbole has no place in technical discourse.

You didn’t demonstrate that because

>The NC must neither assume nor try to guess in advance the exact action performed on an iOS Notification, because these actions are based upon information unavailable to it, as well as other factors such as the ANCS version implemented by the NP. The NP guarantees that positive and negative actions are associated with results that do not surprise the user.

So pebble app can’t explicitly say dismiss or mute but has to hope that the phone does that action on a given notification.

Imagine the app says dismiss but the phone‘s real action is just a snooze.

Press X to maybe dismiss doesn’t sound like a great functionality, does it.