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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

#831

Post by Aachen »

boringg wrote: post #731
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…

It might be a walled garden (which is a form of security) but thats also why a lot of people buy their products. Know your demographic.

I don't think anybody buys their product for the specific reason that they can not do certain things. Nobody likes the restrictions. People buy a product because there are features (things they can do) that they want, including intangible features like usability (it's easier to make a full system backup on iOS than on Android, for example)

Edit: or maybe I'm wrong. I do know one person who bought a phone because it sucked, because they didn't want to spend as much time glued to the device. It was an Android with a tiny tiny screen, though, because iOS would not be allowed to run on hardware of your choosing due to Apple's restrictions... Either way, I guess there is a market of people who do want to inflict pain upon themselves, but this really does seem like exceedingly niche argument to me. Saying that the restrictions are the reason why their demographic buys their device is just buying into Apple's lies that fund their bottom line

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#832

Post by yapyap »

“ You can’t easily side load apps onto an iPhone. That means we have to publish the app on the iPhone appstore. This is a gigantic pain because Apple. Every update comes with the risk that a random app reviewer could make up some BS excuse and block the update”

eh. nowadays it’s easier, at least in the EU

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#833

Post by lou1306 »

Good to point out the anti-competitive practices by Apple, but some of the complaints are a bit far-fetched and do not really help the point the author is making, and/or they do not seem to match my experience with wearables.

For instance, I understand Pebble is targeted to hackers, but how is lack of sideloading such a big pain point? How come my Fitbit (that I absolutely long to exchange for a new Pebble when its time comes) _can_ display my Whatsapp notifications even without full lockscreen previews?

Also:

> As an aside, back at Pebble, we went to crazy lengths to find a way to let Pebble users to send text messages from Pebble.

Why would you... Do that? No 3rd party can do that: you are on a level playing field. A kludge like the one described is not going to give you an edge over the competition. And it is exactly the kind of kludge that may rub App Store reviewers the wrong way. Much pain, no gain. Just invest your limited resources on making Pebble the best 3rd-party watch on the market, and pray/lobby for Apple to open up its APIs.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#834

Post by tonyedgecombe »

Aaargh20318 wrote: post #779
bigyabai wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can thank Apple for the Lightning connector and App Store too, for all the good it does everyone in the EU. If a company uses their power to prevent competition with their own products or services, the market's jurisdiction reserves the right to restore competition to their market and prevent the harms inherent to monopoly abuse.

> You can thank Apple for the Lightning connector and App Store too The App Store was an absolute revolution for mobile app developers. It is hard to overstate how much of an improvement it was over the status quo. People are complaining about Apple taking a 30% cut; it used to be that the operators took a 70% cut. Not for hosting an app store, no, just for sending the reverse-billing SMS message with the install lin…

>People are complaining about Apple taking a 30% cut; it used to be that the operators took a 70% cut.

Not in the PC world, back when the App Store was released I was paying 4% to my e-commerce provider.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#835

Post by Aachen »

rolisz wrote: post #828
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…

Counterpoint: SMS is not a spam cesspit in Romania. My phone number is public (company information is public). And I get 1 completely unsolicited messages per month and 1 per week from companies that I bought something from. That's not even enough to get me to try to get rid of those messages.

To add: it's not about targeting rich markets, either. I have a number from the Netherlands and Germany and neither gets more than one spam SMS per, eh, year maybe on average? Some years none, some years three or so perhaps? When COVID was new, I also got a few spam calls (as did my family around the same time, so I guess it was briefly a thing), but that seems to have stopped again. I've had the Dutch number for 20 years and it's in public records, so it's not brand new and unknown either

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#836

Post by Hammershaft »

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 don't see how spam would be a problem.

Couldn't messages created externally to imessage be tagged as such and then just rate limited?

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#837

Post by tonyedgecombe »

amiga386 wrote: post #639
ketzo wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're being sarcastic, but isn't this all just... correct? Yes, I do trust the company that developed Secure Enclave more than I trust random BLE firmware in a $49 Alibaba watch. More importantly -- my great-uncle can trust the same thing, because Apple has spent decades building that trust. Consumers generally should not trust random hardware. Apple is not random hardware.

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…

>Google, Samsung, Pebble, Amazon, Microsoft, Sony, etc. have also spent decades building trust and don't build random hardware.

I don't trust any of those companies the way I trust Apple.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#838

Post by Aachen »

Defletter wrote: post #827
dingnuts wrote: post #736

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't had a problem with my Wi-Fi in Linux since 2006, what are you on about?

Congrats? I've personally experienced driver issues on my laptop and desktop, both from the hardware being too new for the kernel (or at least the version being used by that distro), within the past two years. And this is LMDE, not some fringe one-man fork.

If we want to pile anecdotes, it just works for me as well. The most recent driver problem I had was Windows, needed to preload something during the installer to get it to recognise hard drives in proxmox working if I remember correctly, and that's not even speaking of printer problems on Windows compared to the seamless integration they now seem to have on Debian (or is my desktop environment responsible for that? Not sure, I'm not super deep into Linux stuff)

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#839

Post by cmiles74 »

msh wrote: post #811
pyrale wrote: post #790

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spammers sending spam through ble ?! They might just as well beat you up and take your wallet.

No, they would on their own phones automate sending spam to the iMessage network using ble at the interface.

Or just send spam through their iPhone.

I don't get this argument that Apple making it difficult for their paying customers to send and receive messages is somehow a good thing. It's also not like Apple is helpless, they managed to shut down Beeper.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#840

Post by seec »

Zak wrote: post #366
tremon wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize this is a very infantilizing attitude? Why can't the end user choose its own level of security vs usability? Letting a corporation decide this for all users is just creating a nanny state in different clothing.

While I agree with you (I daily a rooted Android phone), anyone who cleaned up a few Windows machines for non-technical people 20 years ago probably at least understands where Apple is coming from. The average person is really bad at system administration, and it doesn't take many bad actors creating malware and scams to have a big impact.

It's not really about system administration. The average person is a low effort moron who will do whatever he pleases without thinking about the consequences.

The difference with computing is that since it's "new" and sometimes it has bugs, they will blame the hardware/OS any chance they get.

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