Since beginning of 2025 big corps turned to be each time more anti consumer. They feel quite comfortable. I wonder what happened for them to feel like that.
just since 2025?
Well… since then but also before then.
Verizon is about to break our Gizmo watches
71–80 of 127 posts
Re: Verizon is about to break our Gizmo watches
#72So the author probably could have migrated if he hadn't used a Google Fi phone number for 2FA. Some banks and businesses (such as Uber) will detect a Google Fi or Google Voice number and not let you use them. Other businesses don't do the detection, but the 2FA texts will never arrive. Like the author, I've got some accounts that I was able to set up for 2FA using a Google account, but 2FA no longer works on them.
Google Voice? (and other strictly VoIP services) Absolutely. I've never had a single problem with Google Fi.
I was going to say the same thing. I've been using it close to a decade and I've yet to encounter a circumstance where anything I've used has even seemed aware of the fact that I'm using it rather than a more "traditional" carrier. Conflating both of those would be like saying you need to watch your blood and sugar if you consume a lot of Nestles Crunch bars or Nestle bottled water.
Re: Verizon is about to break our Gizmo watches
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you blame the victim and also admit you haven't explored the author's use case. Very helpful
The victim is complaining that they were hurt. I seek to empower them to not be hurt further. What are you bringing to the table? Snide comments?
Your "seeking to empower" looks a lot like victim blaming in this case.
Maybe if you didn't claim the problem was a mistake on the part of the victim, rather than unearned mistreatment by the carrier?
Or if you provided any solutions or ways to solve the problem other than, don't do the totally normal things for which you were victimized?
Re: Verizon is about to break our Gizmo watches
#74Choosing a carrier device without being on that carrier for the rest of your devices would seem to be the first mistake. Treating the carrier as anything other than dumb pipe seems like the issue here. Going with the Pixel Watch LTE and then doing same custom app development might make more sense for the described use case, but I haven't explored the author's use case thoroughly.
Good point, consumers should all simply develop their own apps instead of buying a product.
Don’t be ridiculous. They could easily use premade products, exclusively, and avoid the inter-provider compatibility problems by deploying meshtastic nodes anywhere they expected their kids to be, and getting them certified as ham radio operators as a backup.
Re: Verizon is about to break our Gizmo watches
#75Cell phone enabled watches are a pile of hacks sitting on top of hacks on top of a system pretending to be a telephone switch board from the 1940s. It’s surprising any of it works.
In what way are watches with SIMs (or eSIMs) not just tiny cell phones? Or is you meaning that the modern smartphone is itself a “pile of hacks sitting on top of hacks”?
As others have said, but also the Apple "watch shares your phone number but not really" where you have a second "real" phone number that actually communicates - reminiscent of how Republic Wireless worked on the Sprint network.
Re: Verizon is about to break our Gizmo watches
#76Cell phone enabled watches are a pile of hacks sitting on top of hacks on top of a system pretending to be a telephone switch board from the 1940s. It’s surprising any of it works.
I just went through this yesterday. My wife and I both have Apple Watches with LTE and I was rolling them over: both phones and my watch ported easily but the second watch wouldn’t show up on the account at all with no explanation. The first support person couldn’t see a problem with the details they were able to see, the second level one could see a fraud hold for non-specific reasons and forwarded us to a fraud tea…
Stuff like this seems like it might happen in any low-quality identity system (possibly aided by customer support who can't possibly be blamed for just trying shit and seeing if it works) regardless of whether it's based on some hacky version of telephony. I often pick up prescriptions for my wife at CVS, so we had her account linked to mine, but after we moved for some reason they had trouble filling one of my prescriptions, and I had to spend a while on the phone with them. They had filled it at the CVS near our old address but for whatever reason their computer system was not able to cancel that like usual and fill it at the one we had switched to, and eventually whatever "fix" they did somehow made my wife's phone number start receiving all of our notifications. Even more confusingly, a prescription I started on later didn't show up in either of our accounts, but it was still getting filled somehow and would be ready when I went there. After around a year of this something changed in their kiosks for putting in your info to get your prescriptions listed, and suddenly I couldn't get it to show up there either and would need to spend an extra 20 minutes hashing it out with them for a couple months. The most recent time I went there, they finally told me that apparently I had two separate accounts: one at our old address (which I hadn't lived at for over a year) with my phone number, and one at our current address with my wife's phone number but the common prefix nickname version of my first name (think like "Will" for William or "Ben" for Benjamin). Because it was somehow on an account with my name, my phone number, my old address, and literally no email address at all, I couldn't log in and view it in the app, and because it would "standardize" my name to the account that had my current address, I couldn't access it on the kiosk. It seems that whichever customer service rep I talked to literally duplicated my account, put my wife's phone number on it, moved all of the prescriptions we had at the time over, and associated my email address with it, but then left the old account otherwise intact and just waiting for some database quirk to unexpectedly end up assigning a new prescription to. The part that surprised me the most was that the person I talked to at CVS was entirely unfazed by this and had a standard process for merging the two accounts, which means that this apparently happens a lot.
Re: Verizon is about to break our Gizmo watches
#77```The associate agreed with me that they should not deprecate the old app until the new app can handle this configuration. I asked them to raise this up the chain: they need to push back the deprecation date.``` There's no way a CSR has any power over this.
But they can, and do. escalate problems. It’s not like there’s a side entrance for people with problems that a CSR can’t solve.
Re: Verizon is about to break our Gizmo watches
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
The main way is that literally zero of these watches actually meet the standards that the cell networks require of a cell phone. Every single one of them has a carrier exemption or a lower standard to adhere to, because it turns out that putting a cell phone's RF package into a watch is super hard, both because of size and the various negative effects of the human body on radio signals. This affects cell phones too o…
> two completely different ways depending on whether it's an iMessage or a regular text Isn't that true for any device? not just watches? A "regular text" would be an SMS and those use Signaling System Number 7 telephony stack. iMessage uses application level protocols sitting on top of IP in the standard OSI model?. SS No 7 only roughly maps into OSI model, the equivalent application layer would use MAP - Mobile app…
> SS No 7 only roughly maps into OSI model, the equivalent application layer would use MAP - Mobile application part.
Well yeah only the OSI stack actually maps onto the OSI model, or should be expected to
Re: Verizon is about to break our Gizmo watches
#79Cell phone enabled watches are a pile of hacks sitting on top of hacks on top of a system pretending to be a telephone switch board from the 1940s. It’s surprising any of it works.
That's how most software works, nowadays: https://xkcd.com/2030/
Re: Verizon is about to break our Gizmo watches
#80Choosing a carrier device without being on that carrier for the rest of your devices would seem to be the first mistake. Treating the carrier as anything other than dumb pipe seems like the issue here. Going with the Pixel Watch LTE and then doing same custom app development might make more sense for the described use case, but I haven't explored the author's use case thoroughly.
Good point, consumers should all simply develop their own apps instead of buying a product.
you only need a few llm subscriptions i suppose?