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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

#841

Post by socksy »

kulahan wrote: post #598
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.

Walled gardens are not inherently bad. I DO thank Apple for the App Store. It’s half the reason I have an iPhone. I WANT to be able to download any stupid thing in there without a care in the world re: viruses or other damaging experiences. This is not to say every aspect of their walled garden is good, but I’m more than happy to accept those problems in light of the benefits I personally value. This is all to say: i…

I never understand this viewpoint — I understand what you're saying but there's no advantage to this over the Play Store model on Android.

You can have the walled garden, and also not restrict people's freedom — on Android I'm sure the number of people that use any other store than the play store or even side load apps are vanishingly small.

To even be able to do it you have to enable it deep in the settings. And even then, if a new app tries to install an apk you have to manually approve that app's ability to do that before reinitiating the entire process.

That's to say, the default experience is very wall gardened, and I do feel somewhat more protected when downloading something from the play store than not, and the vast majority of people will never leave the Google walled garden. But there exists a way to go around that walled garden when you need to, and that doesn't subtract from that walled garden mode in any way IMO.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#842

Post by Aachen »

crazygringo wrote: post #568
clemiclemen wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At which point does a monopoly becomes a monopoly? There is no need to have a "clear" monopoly like Windows in 1990's to abuse your power and presence in the market.

> 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…

> it's much easier to argue that Android has a global monopoly.

Sorta. My understanding is that Google Play has the global monopoly. If it were plain Androids that users bought to own, to do with as they wanted, I'd be much less sombre about where mobile ecosystems are headed (namely, that governments, banks, public transport companies, and many other organisations will require a DRM-locked device if you want to live a normal life, buying bus tickets while passing the algorithmic fraud checks instead of needing to travel to a remaining ticket counter for example). It's barely even the future anymore, bank and transit company apps already mostly only run if you have a Google account and are on a locked-down ("Google Safetynet") device or go to great lengths to hide that you've got full access to your own data on your bought-to-own device

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#843

Post by zevon »

Can anybody explain to me in simple terms the argument about opening the floodgates for spam on iMessage if Apple would lower their restrictions? I just don't get it. If true, wouldn't this mean that every other messenger app with fewer restrictions or even alternative clients would have a massive spam problem? Anecdotally, I can't really confirm that.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#844

Post by jillesvangurp »

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...?

Anti-trust authorities. Non US based government authorities (e.g. in the EU). Etc. The current trade wars might impact Apple the other large Silicon Valley companies pretty soon. Think stricter rules, bigger fines, more restrictions outside the US.

When it comes to Apple, there probably is quite a bit of low hanging fruit:

- Allowing 3rd party interpreters, browsers engines, etc. on IOS. The OS has sandboxing, there should be no security argument here. Android can manage this, so why not Apple?

- Arbitrary app store restrictions and predatory fees on transactions. Apple is getting rich by essentially using mafia style schemes here. Nice App you have there. It would be a shame it got banned. Better implement X, drop feature Y, or else ... Oh and by the way, you need to pay us 30% on every transaction in your app and you are not allowed to link to payment options outside your app.

- Repairability issues. Apple products continue to score low here. And Apple makes quite a bit of money charging 3-4x component cost for parts and upgrades.

There are probably some more issues.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#845

Post by tacker2000 »

snotrockets wrote: post #79
tacker2000 wrote: post #65

Similar thing is going on with the Spotify Apple Watch app, probably so that people migrate to Apple Music... see this discussion, for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/AppleWatch/comments/1h6qmrw/spotify...

With Spotify app, some issues seem to be due to Spotify themselves. For example, even when you explicitly download music to your watch, the app needs network connection to start playing. This seems to be explicit design decision on Spotify's part.

The (unfortunate!) hack here is to disable the BT connection on your phone, works 90% of the time.

Also when downloading songs, its better to disable BT on the phone, otherwise the songs download through BT instead of through the much faster Wifi connection. This is clearly an Apple impendiment here, crippling a feature that should work without these sort of hacks.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#846

Post by Razengan »

> we have to publish the app on the iPhone appstore. Every update comes with the risk that a random app reviewer could make up some BS excuse and block the update.

uhhh and if there wasn't any reviewing, every update would come with a risk of malware to the users.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#847

Post by cmiles74 »

stouset wrote: post #640
mistercheph wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You never needed speeds in excess of usb 2.0? LOL, this is such old hat, guys in IBM t-shirts telling me how nobody ever needed more than 64K, and why go third party with your treasured computation when you can get the best, the infallible, the International Business Machine?

Apple didn't continue to iterate on Lightning because of the obvious future migration to USB-C connectors. I will die on the hill that the Lightning plug is superior to the USB-C plug . Lightning could some day have supported USB-3.2+ speeds, if they'd chosen to work further on it. Still, I have never once transferred data to my iPhone over a USB cable. I have used an iPhone since the first generation. For me, it has…

I'm pretty sure Apple switched to USB-C to comply with EU requirements. I don't think the success of USB-C has much to do with it.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/26/iphone-us...

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#848

Post by madeofpalk »

Razengan wrote: post #846

> we have to publish the app on the iPhone appstore. Every update comes with the risk that a random app reviewer could make up some BS excuse and block the update. uhhh and if there wasn't any reviewing, every update would come with a risk of malware to the users.

App Store reviews does not reduce malware - things slip through Apple's review process all the time. The iOS security features such as the sandbox is what makes iOS safe to run third party apps.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#849

Post by uni_baconcat »

amelius wrote: post #815

Break them open like we did with Bell telephony. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System PS, why keep people defending this locked down consumer brand?

But Apple is neither monopoly nor infrastructure company. Bell telephony has no relevance in this case.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#850

Post by madeofpalk »

iamcalledrob wrote: post #99
CharlesW wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did Meta get special access to do this? Apple would never give Meta access to private APIs. Eric has access to everything that the Meta View app is doing.

Often this is via special entitlements [0]. Published APIs, which you're only allowed to use if Apple approve your request. Apple typically don't publish the criteria for when they approve entitlements, so it's almost impossible to get approved. You need to be a big company with contacts inside Apple. Meta, Google etc. will all have negotiated a bunch of these entitlements for their own apps. But smaller companies ar…

Are you saying that Meta obtained a special entitlement for their glasses that is not available for smaller companies? Source or investigation?
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