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AirPods libreated from Apple's ecosystem

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Re: AirPods libreated from Apple's ecosystem

#71

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

bloppe wrote: post #62
Razengan wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look up Swift

You mean the language that approximately nobody uses outside XCode, which requires you to register an Apple developer account to function? The same language that only switched to an OSS license after they realized nobody wanted to contribute to a proprietary language? Swift is OSS, but it's not a great example to illustrate your point.

Swift went open source the day it was released. I don’t think Apple needs outside contributors. I think it has enough resources that it would be okay

Darwin’s underlying code was BSD license and didn’t require releasing source code.

Re: AirPods libreated from Apple's ecosystem

#72

Post by MattRix »

tshaddox wrote: post #51
SilverElfin wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mercy killed? Flash was great. There were so many inventive games and animations in that era. Apple didn’t mercy kill anything - they just removed a threat to their walled garden ecosystem using their anticompetitive position, but dressed it up as a security issue.

Nah, Flash was awful. Terrible performance on low end devices. Unforgivably terrible for web video. Nightmare on Linux. Nightmare in enterprise environments. There were cool games, but there still are cool games. And the indie/hacker/homebrew gaming ecosystems are bigger, richer, and more accessible than ever (due in no small part to the web, both as a gaming platform and for learning/community).

This take doesn’t make sense unless you’re comparing Flash to current technology, rather than the tech of its time. It’s like saying CD players were awful: sure they’re awful NOW, but they had a time and a place when they were the coolest thing around.

Similarly, the only reason Flash had “bad performance” on low end devices is because people were using it to do stuff that web tech could not do. It took over a decade for web tech to catch up, and 20 years later we still don’t have tooling that’s as good as Flash was (other than Adobe Animate itself).

Calling it “terrible for video” is completely backwards! Flash became the standard for video on the web for years because everything else was terrible and Flash was the only thing that worked. There’s a reason that YouTube used Flash to play videos for the first ten years.

Re: AirPods libreated from Apple's ecosystem

#73

Post by wolpoli »

a13n wrote: post #66
jmgao wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't seem obvious to me that this is actually a bug in the Android implementation, it seems like this is due to AirPods violating the spec and requiring a special handshake before responding to standard requests. It doesn't seem reasonable to expect Android to work around a device that appears to be intentionally breaking the spec for vendor lock-in purposes: the possibility of them just OTAing an update that b…

is there evidence it’s for vendor lock in purposes? airpods have a pretty stellar connection for bluetooth, wouldn’t be surprised if there were performance reasons for them going off spec

Apple is a promoter member of the Bluetooth standard organization for a while now, so it could submit that as an enhancement.

Re: AirPods libreated from Apple's ecosystem

#75

Post by bloppe »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #71
bloppe wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean the language that approximately nobody uses outside XCode, which requires you to register an Apple developer account to function? The same language that only switched to an OSS license after they realized nobody wanted to contribute to a proprietary language? Swift is OSS, but it's not a great example to illustrate your point.

Swift went open source the day it was released. I don’t think Apple needs outside contributors. I think it has enough resources that it would be okay Darwin’s underlying code was BSD license and didn’t require releasing source code.

"[Swift] was initially a proprietary language, but version 2.2 was made open-source software under the Apache License 2.0 on December 3, 2015"

Darwin is also a bad example:

"On July 25, 2006, the OpenDarwin team announced that the project was shutting down, as they felt OpenDarwin had "become a mere hosting facility for Mac OS X related projects", and that the efforts to create a standalone Darwin operating system had failed.[40] They also state: "Availability of sources, interaction with Apple representatives, difficulty building and tracking sources, and a lack of interest from the community have all contributed to this."[41]"

"PureDarwin is a project to create a bootable operating system image from Apple's released source code for Darwin.[43] Since the halt of OpenDarwin and the release of bootable images since Darwin 8.x, it has been increasingly difficult to create a full operating system as many components became closed source."

Re: AirPods libreated from Apple's ecosystem

#76

Post by dagmx »

WD-42 wrote: post #27
blackqueeriroh wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uhhhh, Apple donates a ton of code to OSS

When the license legally compels them to, and sometimes not even then.

An incomplete list here but most aren’t a license that compels them to contribute anything.

https://opensource.apple.com/projects/

Re: AirPods libreated from Apple's ecosystem

#77

Post by ptrl600 »

SilverElfin wrote: post #36
Andrex wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm convinced it's impossible to implement the BT spec without MANY of these kinds of bugs popping up. Apple mercy-killed Adobe Flash, we should be asking they do the same to Bluetooth. I'm sick of living in a reality where no one thinks to make something better. It has to be possible.

Mercy killed? Flash was great. There were so many inventive games and animations in that era. Apple didn’t mercy kill anything - they just removed a threat to their walled garden ecosystem using their anticompetitive position, but dressed it up as a security issue.

Yeah it was superb for the layman.

If there's ever a project for an alternative OSS Flash authoring tool, something intended to be as accessible as Flash 5 or so, I'd love to contribute somehow

Re: AirPods libreated from Apple's ecosystem

#80

Post by helsinkiandrew »

jmgao wrote: post #43
moonleay wrote: post #2

A cool project, when you want to use AirPods outside of Apples ecosystem. Sadly, you have to use a rooted android device with a small patch due to a bug in the Android Bluetooth implementation. https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/371713238

It doesn't seem obvious to me that this is actually a bug in the Android implementation, it seems like this is due to AirPods violating the spec and requiring a special handshake before responding to standard requests. It doesn't seem reasonable to expect Android to work around a device that appears to be intentionally breaking the spec for vendor lock-in purposes: the possibility of them just OTAing an update that b…

Apple have been ‘extending’ the Bluetooth stack for quite awhile. They introduced some BLE features before the spec was finished (I think some 3rd party hearing aids were also compatible).

I haven’t used non apple earphones for awhile but the seamless connectivity performance of AirPods would suggest this was done for performance, not to deliberately lock in devices.

This 2020 paper is great at breaking down some of the extensions: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/woot20-paper-heinze.pdf

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