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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

#681

Post by shuckles »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #573
shuckles wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it does seem like antitrust is the wedge employed by 3rd parties who would like Apple to do free R&D for them, most ironically by Spotify which holds are arguable monopoly on music streaming. I’m glad that antitrust enabled a rich ecosystem of Microsoft Office alternatives and competitors.

Apple certainly doesn't have to do free R&D for third parties. They could, instead, not ship features that work exclusively with other Apple products. Or, hey, there's also the other valid option of "don't be the exclusive gatekeeper of the platform", they're welcome to take that one too. When Apple goes up against governments over encryption, I'll cheer them on with everyone else. When Apple is engaging in https://e…

You are at least an honest critic here in that you admit you'd rather Apple not build great features for its own customers if that means some hypothetical future company isn't allowed to hypothetically build its own version if Apple made some or all of its proprietary R&D available for free to this hypothetical competitor.

Most people pretend that all that effort is free and trivial to expose as API.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#682

Post by shuckles »

jmholla wrote: post #663
shuckles wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Private API is an oxymoron. If it’s a private implementation, then there’s a lot of work that would need to be done to make it API!

There is no part of the definition of API that requires it to be public. It's Application Programming Interface. You can have internal APIs.

Now we're just playing semantic games. There's a big difference between the level of effort that goes into internal API and public API, and clearly the ask here is Apple undertake that effort now and forevermore to support a public API for Pebble to use for free. You can map that distinction pretty easily onto my earlier comments without changing my argument at all.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#683

Post by shuckles »

csours wrote: post #518
shuckles wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Allowing support for a rich ecosystem of mediocre smart watches does not move the needle on making it better for me personally. And Apple probably has done the market research to confirm most of their customers are like me and not like Pebble users.

> And Apple probably has done the market research to confirm most of their customers are like me and not like Pebble users. I'm sure. The customers they do not have are like Pebble users, and they don't want customers like Pebble users. They want customers like Apple Watch users. It is a bit 'masque of the red death' to defend anti-competitive practices, is all I'm saying.

How is it anti-competitive for Apple to pick its own customers? A decade ago, Android used to argue that open was better. Now, people seem to argue that closed should be illegal.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#684

Post by apimade »

chamanbuga wrote: post #191
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…

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 someone who has found a lot of holes both in design and implementation, which have been reviewed and vetted by excellent people and companies, which have all the appropriate certifications - no thank you.

I understand the benefit of an open ecosystem. Use your web browser, or a third-party app. The tech adopted by the masses needs guard rails and secure defaults.

I hated Apple’s ecosystem growing up, now I think it’s necessary. We can’t trust developers, or companies, that have competing interests to do the right thing.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#685

Post by Avamander »

rezonant wrote: post #557
Avamander wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should be, but BT stacks are super crap and it's hard to truly guarantee that. Pretty sure they do not currently require the highest (actually proper) security level from everyone.

So Apple's BT stack is crap? Because that's the one that is in control here...

Might be, but I meant the wearables' stacks. Fundamentally Apple can't ensure much more than a vaguely transport encrypted connection to such a peripheral.

Apple can't (trivially) detect if there's a fatal flaw in the way the other side derives their secrets for example. They can't know if the device doesn't have a backdoor characteristic/API that gives access to the key material. They can't know if that proprietary stack can't be exploited in n+1 ways because it has been written by an underpaid intern.

But if Apple gave access to everything over BLE they would be expected to. At least by most Apple users. Be it a good or a bad thing. It's a rather enormous access vector, if they'd provide feature parity(-ish) with Watch.

Much more sensible would be to make such features available to apps (and by proxy, wearables) with entitlements. But even then it can be just as insecure, just by proxy.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#686

Post by golergka »

coolspot wrote: post #228
snotrockets wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With Spotify app, some issues seem to be due to Spotify themselves. For example, even when you explicitly download music to your watch, the app needs network connection to start playing. This seems to be explicit design decision on Spotify's part.

Likely a condition from IP holders to make sure the play is counted and paid for.

Spotify has offline mode in their iPhone app

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#687

Post by shuckles »

crazygringo wrote: post #566
NotPractical wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You said that Apple makes the best tech, but you wouldn't know, because you cannot pair third party accessories with your Apple devices and have them work properly, so you cannot determine if third parties are capable of making accessories better than Apple or not. Whether or not a third party is capable of making a better "ecosystem" of interconnected devices is a separate concern; I'm talking about accessories here…

I wouldn't know? Kind of amazing you're so confident I don't use the Android ecosystem for a whole bunch of stuff. You know a lot of people use one ecosystem for personal stuff, and another for work? Also that people do stuff like... read reviews? Compare features? Compare specs?

Sometimes I get the feeling that a lot of people are upset that Apple is deciding what's best for their customers, and customers are happy with that, instead of everyone asking their nerdy cousin or whatever. The condescension towards satisfied Apple users is really shocking.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#688

Post by frollogaston »

golergka wrote: post #676
frollogaston wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly don't care about Microsoft bundling a browser. The real problem was that they intentionally broke web standards to push websites to "work best on Internet Explorer," so even those who chose not to use Windows were caught up in it. Whereas, Android users aren't affected by what Apple does here. They still bundle Edge, and keep setting it to default. But idc, it's just one of 1000 reasons I don't use Windows…

> The real problem was that they intentionally broke web standards to push websites to "work best on Internet Explorer," so even those who chose not to use Windows were caught up in it. Microsoft tried to build their own extensions to the internet standards, like activex and proprietary DOM/JScript extensions, explicitly designed to lock devs into IE’s ecosystem. It's quite impressive that they managed to miss this o…

Both Adobe and Microsoft missed the mobile boat.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#689

Post by shuckles »

DecentShoes wrote: post #590
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…

Apple is monopolizing lots of things. You aren't allowed to make software for the iPhone without distributing exclusively thru the App Store. This whole post is about how they restrict third party watches.

Restriction is an odd term to describe: "They don't proactively build a suite of tools and APIs to facilitate third party watch development."

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#690

Post by amiga386 »

ketzo wrote: post #667
amiga386 wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google, Samsung, Pebble, Amazon, Microsoft, Sony, etc. have also spent decades building trust and don't build random hardware. But that doesn't matter because Apple locks them all out and insists you remain within their walled garden where it alone profits from you. If you don't want a future where you have to buy Apple milk to put in your Apple fridge (because the fridge stops refrigerating if you try putting any ot…

That’s not the point, though. Any method by which apple exposes APIs to Samsung, Google, etc: - requires immense development effort and expansion of security surface area - STILL offloads trust to Samsung, Google, etc The hyperbole here is a little hysterical. Apple doesn’t totally lock out third parties. In the smartwatch example, it is a very specific set of features which involved passing data (which users expect…

Anywhere Apple trusts itself is a place where they can trust a third party.

Anywhere Apple wouldn't trust a third party is a place it should not trust itself either.

It doesn't even have to be arbitrary third parties, it can be Apple's chosen third parties. But they'll choose nobody, because they love lock-in too much, and they'll tell the rubes that it can't be done or it's too hard. That's just bullshit, and they know it. They do it to lock out competitors, so they alone can juice their existing users.

The only thing that can open up Apple is regulation -- and as we've seen in with Apple's spiteful attempts at compliance with EU DMA rulings, it makes up arbitrary criteria calculated to maximally lock out and frustrate business rivals. It's like it's trying to come up with a compliance solution that the EU might accept but would result in as few competitors as possible able to actually use it, ideally zero.

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