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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

#691

Post by mulderc »

bhelkey wrote: post #578
mulderc wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ap…

> I'm happy the people that want such a device are getting it That's the important bit. I personally don't see the value in a wifi/cellular watch when I already carry a phone that has wifi and cellular. I get a lot of value in a watch with extended batter life. For example, I don't need to pack a dedicated watch charger when I travel.

What I love about smart watches is you don’t have to carry your phone. You can leave it behind and not miss much.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#692

Post by shuckles »

tavavex wrote: post #422
briandear wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the ecosystem. If you don’t, choose another ecosystem.

If you like it, use it. Why not let other people augment the ecosystem? If Apple allowed Pebble to get full permissions and it all turned out to be the extremely unsafe, buggy disaster that everyone here chooses to portray it as, then you can still buy an Apple Watch. In what way does shutting out the competition benefit you?

How many users do you think call Apple everyday to complain about issues with their third party, knockoff AirPods lookalikes? Could you imagine why Apple could be protective of the user experience of their hardware and sensitive to that user experience being compromised by poorly implemented or nonfunctional peripherals? For every Pebble user, how many people might buy ripoff Apple Watches?

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#693

Post by theelous3 »

apimade wrote: post #684
chamanbuga wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

> I hated Apple’s ecosystem growing up, now I think it’s necessary.

Funny, because the overwhelming majority of people and systems exist outside of it and are doing just fine. This sounds like the sentiment of a crab in a bucket who's feeling quite safe from the sides since it was caught.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#694

Post by grishka »

briandear wrote: post #297
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.

I like the ecosystem. If you don’t, choose another ecosystem.

What if you like their computers but absolutely can't stand their mobile devices though?

I got fed up with the walled gardens enough that I made a macOS app to transfer files to and from Android devices using Google's Quick Share protocol (that I had to reverse engineer first).

And no, don't suggest me to try desktop Linux. I want to use my system, not maintain it.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#695

Post by vv_ »

NotPractical wrote: post #672
vv_ wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is bad. Google (Android) is bad. So what is the solution here for the common non-tech savvy smartphone user?

I would say that custom Android-based ROMs like GrapheneOS are the solution, but Google is actively sabotaging those with the Play Integrity API so I don't know if they will be usable by the average person in the long-term (unless Google is legally compelled to stop this). So honestly I think that legislation such as what's happening in the EU is the only solution. This includes investigating Google as well as Apple.…

> which sounds like misplaced priority to me

Agreed.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#696

Post by jdironman »

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?

He is specifically talking about accessories, in this case the watches. including apple watches and 3rd party. if apple watches integrate natively, but 3rd party watches don't have the same level of integration then there is no way in the apple ecosystem to make a comparative decision on which watch you want to use as you're automatically funneled into apple watches by design. Now on android, most watches integrate pretty much the same. maybe a different on phone app, but, most APIs are pretty accessible between all devices. (I might be wrong about this)

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#697

Post by crazygringo »

dvngnt_ wrote: post #596
crazygringo wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At which point does a monopoly becomes a monopoly? It's generally in the 70-90% range. Right now, it's much easier to argue that Android has a global monopoly. > There is no need to have a "clear" monopoly like Windows in 1990's to abuse your power and presence in the market. Well it depends what you mean by "abuse". I mean, even small companies can "abuse" their customers by not building the interoperability their…

we're getting close then in usa https://www.counterpointresearch.com/insights/us-smartphone-... https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https://www.wsj.com...

The median in the first chart is 53%. So not really. Apple is just seasonally high in Q4 presumably because iPhones make good Christmas presents. And still below 70%.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#698

Post by presentation »

Retric wrote: post #216
chamanbuga wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Yeah, but while Apple might consider the hardware to be "untrusted", at some point I trust the hardware I bought. Apple telling me I cannot decide what devices are trusted or not is annoying.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#699

Post by johnnyanmac »

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…

>I do not believe vendors integrating with such a thing can do it safely, or even that all vendors integrating are good actors.

Well, Apple will sure make sure the hard task is impossible. That's where the fault lies. It can be a bit tiring hearing security used as a smokescreen to maintain a monopolistic structure over uhh... green bubbles?

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#700

Post by TheDong »

lloeki wrote: post #593
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too have a very capable smartwatch (fitness watch - Garmin Fenix) and it's remarkable how different my experience with messages and actions are relative to the experience of Garmin users with Apple phones. Garmin Connect always runs in the background on my Android phone, watching for notifications, pulling data from and pushing data to Garmin servers on my behalf even when I'm not using the app. It's third-party, b…

> watching for notifications, pulling data from and pushing data to Garmin servers on my behalf even when I'm not using the app. It's third-party, but it's reasonably well-written and doesn't nuke my phone battery or data plan > get text notifications on my watch for any [...] apps that provide notifications, and relevant ones (like text messages, whether SMS or RCS [or iMessage]) I get this behaviour on iOS+Garmin,…

The Garmin experience on iOS is noticeably inferior for me.

On android, you can turn off forwarding notifications to the watch on a per-app basis, so for example I can have youtube put notifications into the android notification center, but not the watch.

On iOS, you can't configure which apps forward notifications to a garmin watch. You only get all or nothing. Apple watch can do this just fine.

Is that not an issue for you? Do you not feel hobbled by that?

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