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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

#961

Post by ketzo »

zamadatix wrote: post #960
ketzo wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple claims their restrictions on competitors are only about security, privacy, crafting a better experience etc etc. At least that’s what they tell you as they tuck you into bed. Ah, yes, the author is clearly interested in an in-depth discussion of the tradeoffs in allowing 3rd-party users access to data that you tell your customers is 100% always encrypted.

The HN comments are for our discussion. If you choose to latch on to portions of initial posts or comments like the latter for swipes than that's the kind of discussion we get to have. If you choose to focus most of the discussion on other lines like: > I personally don’t agree - they’re clearly using their market power to lock consumers into their walled ecosystem. This causes there to be less competition, which inc…

Okay, I was being a little snarky. But that quoted portion doesn't really contradict my point; that is in no way an exploration of good reasons why Apple might want to make these choices.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#962

Post by zamadatix »

ketzo wrote: post #961
zamadatix wrote: post #960

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The HN comments are for our discussion. If you choose to latch on to portions of initial posts or comments like the latter for swipes than that's the kind of discussion we get to have. If you choose to focus most of the discussion on other lines like: > I personally don’t agree - they’re clearly using their market power to lock consumers into their walled ecosystem. This causes there to be less competition, which inc…

Okay, I was being a little snarky. But that quoted portion doesn't really contradict my point; that is in no way an exploration of good reasons why Apple might want to make these choices.

It wasn't meant to contradict this point, Apple isn't supposed to want to be regulated by the DOJ.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#963

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

dns_snek wrote: post #316
fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I absolutely hate these sorts of nagging popups and I’m happy that a vendor I already have to trust doesn’t pop them up when I acquire a new product and sign it into my Apple account. Imo, if this were to happen, it should happen by allowing devices like the pebble watch to sign into an Apple account and acquire permissions through that process rather than nagging on my phone on pairing.

What are you proposing exactly? What can be simpler than a single Yes/No prompt?

I think I was pretty clear. You setup your pebble watch via openid connect/oauth like any other API client. No nag popups, manual Bluetooth pairing, etc.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#964

Post by idiotsecant »

int_19h wrote: post #510
idiotsecant wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should be able to.

That would be a good way to reduce the efficiency of the remaining antibiotics very quickly. (But also, this kind of thing is exactly why the analogy doesn't even make sense.)

You're right. This is a good reason to restrict this class of drugs. There is a finite usefulness, oh which each person who uses them consumes a tiny little bit.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#965

Post by megablast »

josefresco wrote: post #3

I have a very capable smartwatch and it's ridiculously bad how hobbled it is on iOS. I'm glad to see this article specifically highlight the issues, and how it's 100% Apple's intention to make non-Apple wearables on iOS terrible.

I have a very capable smartwatch that I will not mention the brand once. OK.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#966

Post by idiotsecant »

lynx97 wrote: post #793
idiotsecant wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should be able to.

You can't be serious, right? I don't even want to imagine how many people would accidentally kill themselves or at least seriously damage their health if that was the status quo.

Is that my job to prevent? If someone wants to do the most damaging things possible, to intentionally kill themselves, should I feel entitled to stop it?

People should be free to do stupid things, so long as they don't hurt others (the antibiotics example that another poster gave us a much stronger argument)

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#967

Post by idiotsecant »

dickersnoodle wrote: post #950
idiotsecant wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should be able to.

This sounds like a libertarian take, in the sense of "libertarians are like housecats - convinced of their own fierce independence but totally dependent on systems they neither control nor understand".

I'd be interested to hear your original thoughts on why my position is incorrect.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#968

Post by vessenes »

dns_snek wrote: post #921
vessenes wrote: post #912

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is definitely harder to automate than SMS. Very large companies exist only to provide API-backed support for automated SMS. In contrast you need to hook into Apple APIs / scripting / sqlite databases on trusted apple hardware in order to automate iMessage. You imagine "Pebble" as one company and say "how hard can it be to turn this on?" As I said in the original comment, it's not that it's hard, it's that it can o…

Can you stop moving the goalposts? There's a ready-to-go open source solution for MacOS [1] that exposes a REST API [2] for interacting with iMessage which allows automation and the sky hasn't fallen like you predicted it would. Professional spammers would no doubt be way ahead in capabilities. Relying on clients to stop spam would break just about every security design principle so that could never be the primary sp…

Bluebubbles requires running Mac hardware, or a Mac virtual machine, which if run on non-Apple hardware violates Apples ToS. You may not care about that but enterprises certainly do.

This is worlds away from twilio which will provide you with orders of magnitude more throughout and deliver it with SLAs.

And unless you imagine Apple will hardware certify pebbles, how does Apple determine the BLE endpoint is actually a Pebble? If you have a way to ensure that without a key registry and TEE controlled by Apple, congratulations — Turing award is incoming.

Upshot: You’re a hacker on a hacker forum - cool. Sending one to ten programmatic iMessages in a hack is easy for you. But you may not have all the experience necessary to opine on how that compares to accessing an enterprise grade hyperscale sms messaging solution: building those is challenging, the companies that do a good job are worth billions of dollars and they exist solely to allow bulk SMS. To think blue bubbles somehow dunks on the idea that these economies of scale don’t matter isn’t correct in my opinion.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#969

Post by alphan0n »

xenodium wrote: post #887
alphan0n wrote: post #703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the profile supports it, but Apple doesn’t support all the implementations as outlined in the profile. I’ve been barking up this tree for nearly a decade.

> I’ve been barking up this tree for nearly a decade. I did for some time too. Look into it again :)

If you can produce a working proof of concept for sending sms or iMessages from a third party Bluetooth device with MAP on current iOS, I’ll follow you anywhere captain.

Re: Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

#970

Post by dwaite »

modeless wrote: post #270
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…

Apple makes a mockery of their own "security promises" for iMessage by not end-to-end encrypting iMessages in iCloud by default. Ridiculous to use that as a justification to prevent users from choosing to send their messages to watches that happen to be made by someone other than Apple.

I don't understand, there is no option for iMessages to not be end to end encrypted. Are you speaking to the security of the recipient's backups?
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