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Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

ericmigi.com

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Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#81

Post by liuliu »

I think, we fundamentally lack a mechanism to enforce secure / privacy aware APIs without resorting to trusted inner-circle type of things. I am already not comfortable with Apple picking winners (such as giving Zoom special entitlement but not the VOIP apps you want to distribute by your own). Apple trusting their own apps more than other apps is another symptom of this and it is not helping their anti-trust situation even if it is with good-will.

And "giving people choice" won't work neither because people will just tap whatever checkbox you give them (the internet should never forget that Facebook SDK just forces to accept "The App is Tracking You" notification and most users tapped yes).

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#82

Post by kelnos »

jisnsm wrote: post #8

If iOS only allows you to build a worse experience, then Apple customers will leave the platform for Android. The problem solves itself.

No, because it's much lower friction to "just" give up and buy an Apple Watch (or just do without), even if you don't like it and think that the features or design a third-party watch are better for you. Or at least could be better, if not for Apple's anti-competitive practices.

The problem is that people don't really have choice. Both iOS and Android have positives and negatives, and often those positives and negatives are not the same. Choosing one or the other is going to have you missing some positives you want, and taking on some negatives that bug you.

If this was just the nature of how things have to be, I'd be more sympathetic. But the real reason it's this way is due to anti-competitive behavior on the part of Apple. There are no technical limitations; it's just their business model to restrict what people can do with the device they've bought. There are certainly some valid security reasons for doing this in some cases, but most of it is just to protect their revenue streams.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#84

Post by neilv »

diggan wrote: post #61
cm2012 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is apple's modus operandi. Hobble competitors even if it's anti-customer. Fill the gap themselves for higher profits.

Don't forget the classic "Oh, that 3rd party app/feature is so popular, I bet we could build a identical/slightly less useful thing ourselves so people don't have to use other things than Apple software ever"

If necessary, you can even retroactively ban the competitor's app from the App Store that you control.

As pretext, you can say the competitor's app is doing something now considered insecure or not privacy-respecting, or is not compliant with some new user experience or quality curation that you do.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#85

Post by rickdeckard »

nickthegreek wrote: post #40
film42 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s impossible for a 3rd party smartwatch to send text messages, or perform actions on notifications (like dismissing, muting, replying) and many, many other things. Unless I'm crazy, I think I've used my Meta Ray-Bans to do all of these things at some point. So is this a watch only limitation that Meta was able to avoid?

It might be because Meta iOS app is handling some of that handoff and its not possible to do these action purely via the BT api? It seems like in the end they recognize if that had an iOS app they could accomplish some of their wishlist items. However, there are other valid critiques here.

Seems to be correct, according to [0] the user needs to link the Meta View app with WhatsApp, not sure if the link is then made on the cloud or on the local device...:

"Use the Meta View app to connect Ray-Ban Stories and Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses to WhatsApp on your phone."

[0] https://faq.whatsapp.com/836703167795647?locale=en_US&cms_id...

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#87

Post by wlesieutre »

rickdeckard wrote: post #73

> "Apple’s “Watch Policy” annoys me, but not enough to switch to Android. I hope Apple will be forced to improve their compatibility with other watches." The conundrum of "[xyz] annoys me, but not enough to [do anything about it], yet I hope [Company] will be forced to improve [xyz]" So where is that 'force' expected to come from...?

If there are effectively two choices and both of them do things you don’t like, “it’s your fault for not switching to the other one” isn’t a very useful argument

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#90

Post by rickdeckard »

diggan wrote: post #61
cm2012 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is apple's modus operandi. Hobble competitors even if it's anti-customer. Fill the gap themselves for higher profits.

Don't forget the classic "Oh, that 3rd party app/feature is so popular, I bet we could build a identical/slightly less useful thing ourselves so people don't have to use other things than Apple software ever"

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...

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