I do not believe average smartwatch users understand what they’d be doing if they got this. I do not believe vendors integrating with such a thing can do it safely, or even that all vendors integrating are good actors.
One reason iMessage is less of a total cesspit than SMS is that the ecosystem is closed, and makes automation difficult. It used to be impossible nearly, and in that era we had almost no iMessage spam. Now it’s difficult, and we have moderate iMessage spam. But adding hooks to make this automation easy, and worse, leave the trust environment as a feature is just wrong.
We're going to have to do insane things to get them working. Due to how ANCS works, we're considering developing an ANCS "doohicky" (either a BLE pop-socket, smart-ring, or mag-safe wallet) which gets notifications via BLE & relays them back to the iPhone, to then send to the glasses. That would just get us the raw notifications, though, and wouldn't solve the issue of replying. The other option is a Beeper-like system in the cloud to bypass iOS entirely, but that also has downsides.
It's a total mess, especially compared to Android where you can just easily listen for notifications & send them to the glasses without much pushback from the system.
Allowing devices to view and respond to messages is inherently lower risk than allowing them to freely communicate with anyone.
I appreciate you sharing your experience, I just wish you could have done it without this bit.
I understand the benefit of an open ecosystem. Use your web browser, or a third-party app. The tech adopted by the masses needs guard rails and secure defaults.
I hated Apple’s ecosystem growing up, now I think it’s necessary. We can’t trust developers, or companies, that have competing interests to do the right thing.
Is it? My iPhone replicates messages to my mac from where a process can extract that data, it can capture the screen etc. I can use a mac today to set up a relay that would then send those messages to a smart watch if one would do that.
That said, I don’t see why Apple can’t provide toolkit/certification that will make it safe to communicate over Bluetooth. They already have it in-place for Apple Watch.
Step 2: Have the iPhone pop up saying "do you want <Apple watch> to be able to send messages?" and don't just assume "yes"
Both steps would improve security, even if they harm Apple's profits.
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.
That's exactly it.
You've always been able to use Applescript to send iMessages on a Mac.
Anyone can already screenshot iMessages and move them out of the "security boundary"... which btw doesn't exist much, as if you have any Mac connected to your iCloud account then those messages are being synced to an SQLite DB any process running under your user can access.
You will need to grant that app explicit Full Disk Access permissions in order for it to access that folder.
People’s phones got compromised by NSO sending images to them via whatsapp that used an exploit in one of the image libraries to run a malware payload. The security boundary isn’t about whether you can see your own messages, it’s whether bad people can root your phone by getting untrusted code to run. That’s a very different proposition if iMessage is a single codebase that they fully own end to end versus it has a plugin ecosystem. Having such a plugin system widens the security boundary by adding a much larger codebase that would require trust.
I don't think that's the main reason. iMessage is available on macOS, so by definition isn't that tightly locked down. Anyone can automate/script the desktop app to try and fire off as many messages as you like.
But of course that won't really work because Apple has security algorithms in the network that detect unusual behaviour. Did that user/device suddenly start to fire off 1000 messages to users they've never contacted before? Activity flagged, user blocked.
There are also functions in the iMessage app itself to block and report unwanted/inappropriate/spam messages. So even low-volume spammers will not get away with it for long.
Besides, in the UK, SMS spam is almost non-existent in my experience. Unlike in some other countries I've visited where it's a huge problem. That's not because the ecosystem is any different - it's because there's strict rules that are actively enforced (see TPS: www.tpsonline.org.uk).
That like saying "people want reliable cars" conveniently aligns with Toyota's interest and implying there's something wrong happening.
This is just about sending.
They could implement something that works for other smartwatch vendors, they haven't because they don't want to.
PebbleOS is asking for the ability to respond to messages with reply or user interactions. This is not a security breach. And it won't leak from encryption anymore than it is leaking now.
Hardware should be able to be interoperable. Apple chooses not to, it's in their best interest because they claim "security" and "privacy" for it's users. Security theater for the masses.
Bluetooth devices on iOS that display notifications already are getting more information than normal by simply even reading all notifications. Normal apps on iOS can’t do that, they have no reason to. This api was added because smart watches kinda need that functionality to be useful. I think it’s still locked behind a “this device will see all your stuff” permissions box.
I do think they should add in more iMessage/sms/replying capabilities to smart watches though. I think they are extremely hesitant to make it even easier to automate iMessages. iMessage spam is definitely increasing, but it’s NOT as prevalent as normal sms spam for instance. The barriers are much higher, and Apple can basically blacklist devices/appleIDs that send out too much spam, partly because they’ve kept iMessage so locked down.
Would like to add my personal experience: I get way more spam iMessages coming from random Apple IDs than I do spam SMSes.
My phone works, I'm glad it blocks others from integrating because I need it to always just work. That's why I still have an iPhone over all the often paper superior alternatives.
That's the root of the problem right there. As a hardware vendor, how do you achieve a "trusted" status in their ecosystem?
If only Apple devices can do the Appley things, then it really isn't an ecosystem (at least not what I have in mind when applying that term).
For the spam example, nothing prevents apple from offering a ble api with auth that ensures that only devices manually paired by the user access it.
As for automating spam... when we’re discussing ble, we’re talking about a device a few meters away from your phone. What are spammers going to do, send a jogger right behind you that spams you after somehow hacking apple’s auth system?!
Well, Apple will sure make sure the hard task is impossible. That's where the fault lies. It can be a bit tiring hearing security used as a smokescreen to maintain a monopolistic structure over uhh... green bubbles?
Perhaps SMS spam is a US thing?
It's not unique to Apple. And we should take security seriously. To people who are technically literate and think they can navigate security risks it's not a big deal but people's entire lives are frequently turned upside down by scams and security loopholes
An average user can't dive into the bluetooth driver code and figure out where in the 4000 page spec something deviates and is now a security issue. So we have to assume the worst.
I can understand if media poses concerns, but inbound and output text consisting entirely of UTF-8 characters?
Couldn't messages created externally to imessage be tagged as such and then just rate limited?
apple already does blue for in network and green for out of network
red can just be “this message was yolo’d, be aware”
This is the line of reasoning that has resulted in me being unable to sign up with a shocking amount of house rental companies, thanks to Play Integrity on the android side of the coin. Does it improve security for me? I would argue it doesn't, as it would force me to use unpatched versions of Android. If it's not serving the user, who is it for?
Really? I'm not in the Apple ecosystem to confirm but it looks trivial to me, and you can always fall back to keyboard/mouse input type of automation.
https://medium.com/@jameskabbes/sending-imessages-with-pytho...
Regardless of the reason, there is substantially (many orders of magnitude) less spam on Apple’s networks, at least for me, when compared to SMS/RCS/telephony.
Is this really true? I receive a lot of iMessage (not SMS) spam on iOS devices too. In fact for me I see more spam purely on iMessage than SMS. It wasn’t like that in the past, but my point is even closed systems can be abused.
Garmin Connect always runs in the background on my Android phone, watching for notifications, pulling data from and pushing data to Garmin servers on my behalf even when I'm not using the app. It's third-party, but it's reasonably well-written and doesn't nuke my phone battery or data plan - Android doesn't need to protect me or their reputation from Garmin. I can always check the weather or look at my daily workouts or whatever on my watch and trust that it's recently been upodated by the phone app phone. Garmin users with Apple phones complain that "Garmin doesn't work" after every iOS update that further hobbles the Garmin background service.
I get text notifications on my watch for any Android apps that provide notifications, and relevant ones (like text messages, whether SMS or RCS) provide an option to reply from the watch. I tap the top right button on the watch and scroll to "OK" or "Thanks" or "Can't talk right now" or whatever one of a half dozen canned responses covers 90% of my needs in this mode, and don't have to dig my phone out of my backpack or otherwise interact. Emails, calendar appointments, clock stuff, music controls, etc. all work over the watch. It's just as privileged as the phone, I'm not concerned about my Garmin intruding on my privacy as protected by Android, I wear the watch 24/7 and it has more data on me than the phone!
The trillion dollar companies are so massive that they are impinging upon every category of business that touches them. And they're so massive that their sinnew and tendrils touch everything under the sun.
Mobile computing is de-facto owned by two companies. It's owned, tightly controlled like an authoritarian government, and heavily taxed. Compared with the (formerly?) open web and desktop of the 90's - 10's, we've wound up in a computing universe where we're all serfs.
We're in a stagnant world where platforms don't evolve because that's where the moats lie.
Google, Apple, Amazon, and Meta desperately need to be broken up into multiple subsidiary companies. It'll oxygenate the entire tech sector and unlock pent up, unrealized value for the shareholders of these equities.
The reason we seldom see centicorn startups or blockbuster tech IPOs is because FAANG (or whatever we call it nowadays) has a dragnet where they can snuff out the markets of new upstarts or M&A on the cheap.
It costs nothing for Amazon to become Hollywood, buy James Bond and Lord of the Rings, become a primary care doctor, become a grocery store, and cross-sell all of these highly unrelated products on prime advertising real estate. It's essentially free for them to put ads at the top of the Amazon store and emblazen it on their delivery trucks and boxes. The old media, which were once healthy competitors, have to spend hundreds of millions to reach the same eyeballs.
We've wound up with Standard Oil 2.0 and it's deeply damaging our market. The innovators and innovation capital are no longer being rewarded. The calcified institutions are snuffing out everything that moves in search of remaining growth.
We must break up these companies. That is the only healthy way forward.
Many of us are not required to use Apple devices (and we choose not to). Additionally, many of us are able to choose privacy-respecting Android variants (like GrapheneOS). It sometimes is less "convenient", but IMHO it is better then surrendering to the duopoly...
Still beats the Windows era when a single company owned desktop computing (which was the only type of computing for consumers).
> We've wound up with Standard Oil 2.0
Skipped right over Microsoft!
> We must break up these companies.
With Microsoft it was a complex consent decree. (The initial ruling to break up the company was overturned.)
What we need is a law that requires companies like Apple to allow their customers to install and run the software they wish, and provide external developers with the same OS features their internal teams have access to.
Europe and Brazil already have such laws, though they could go farther.
In the US we had this bill, which would have covered most of these issues and had bipartisan support: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_App_Markets_Act
Government is a useful tool to clean up the dissenters who wish to act against the will of the people, but under a democracy you cannot believe that the majority are the dissenters. That defies the entire premise.
It's also great that Apple is able to negotiate with countries as an equal wrt. user privacy, iMessage is the only e2e encrypted messenger allowed in China, and is currently able to mobilize a significant political movement against mandatory backdoors in the UK
But we should also talk about the inverse thing where they give themselves an advantage in positive ways. Like for example, iOS devices will regularly advertise Apple’s own Siri intelligence or their own games subscription or news subscription or iCloud or whatever. These get special treatment and show up in unexpected ways - notifications that you cannot prevent ahead of time or in your system menu with an annoying badge you cannot dismiss until you click the thing. These are things Apple only does does THEIR OWN products and services. It gives them an anti competitive advantage against others, but it does so not by crippling others but by boosting themselves.
All of this should be illegal. I dislike regulations sometimes, for example when EU regulation gets into censorship. But they seem to be doing a lot more to help customers and support competition than the US. While Trump talked a lot about breaking up big tech, I am skeptical as to whether he’ll do anything to actually support competition and actual free markets. It will require regulation, not posturing.
This is 90% of humanity, including people we all know and love.
Apple serves these people pretty well.
In the 1990's, Microsoft Windows had over 90% of operating system market share. They were a monopoly.
iPhones are only 58% versus Android in the US right now. That's nowhere close to monopoly. Globally Android has 71%. Android is thriving.
With Windows, you didn't have a choice. With iOS and Android, you have choice.
And that's a key part of the discussion.
They still bundle Edge, and keep setting it to default. But idc, it's just one of 1000 reasons I don't use Windows.
Imagine if you could swap out Siri for Alexa. The privacy guarantees are nothing alike. People buy iPhones because they prohibit unsafe choices.
If you don't like it (and I can totally understand why), there are numerous other smartphone makers out there with products that allow better integration with these watches and you're free to buy one.
MS didn't get into trouble because they went after competing browsers, they got into trouble for doing that while also having a monopoly on PC OSes. Apple doesn't have anything like a monopoly in this market (their US market share is about 50%, worldwide is around 28%).
To give one example, Apple has removed an option for Airdrop file sharing between iPhones that are not on one another’s contact lists after the pressure from the Chinese government to stop it from being used for protests coordination. And yet this change was silently rolled out globally as a part of an iOS update.
So, no, “Good enough for most people” is not actually good enough.
This is correct, as in some countries, you use your phone to authenticate access to banking applications and payments (e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart-ID). However, I find it a bit of a stretch to claim that having iMessage access on a smartwatch is essential for being a functional member of society.
Corporations will always take steps to ensure their profitability. Apple, for example, is incentivized to keep its systems locked down to maintain its ecosystem. There are likely other justifiable considerations behind these decisions. While laws exist to regulate what corporations can and cannot do, there should be a reasonable balance. That said, I don’t think this is a battle worth fighting - people can simply switch to an Android phone, which offers better support for a wider range of smartwatches.
But, gone are the fun days people spam airdropping funny "This is the captain" pictures to everyone while waiting for takeoff in an airplane.
I tend to side somewhat with what the author is saying: they can be both relatively true statements and a way to abuse market power at the same time so identifying it as fitting the mold of one or the other is only the start of the conversation. People against the practices tend to care more about the latter and I think that's why we've seen the EU, Japan, and now Brazil regulate the behavior based on that rather than asking "what's Apple's target usage type".
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.
You're making that statement as if iPhones don't have security issues and people using Android definitely have to learn about those things.
> They want to just click 'yes' on every popup and expect things to keep working. Because they know that they are not qualified to answer that yes/no popup question. And those people do not care much about lock-in and walled gardens.
What exactly is it that Apple does that makes it not matter whether you click 'yes' or 'no' on these popups?
This also doesn't address the obvious solution: safe and easy defaults, and an option for manual overrides in advanced "I know what I'm doing" settings.
And no pop-ups at all.
This is an extremely dangerous mindset, even if you never leave Apple's garden. As a reminder, Facebook and TikTok are on the App Store. We cannot encourage this zombie-like behavior and simultaneously have a healthy, free society.
> Because they know that they are not qualified to answer that yes/no popup question
Apple put thought into their permission system and made it easy to understand even among non-HN users, so that regular people can make meaningful choices about what information they want to share with apps and the companies who make them. There might as well be no permission system and no sandboxing at all if users are just going to spam the "yes" button all the time.
If Apple wants to be the brand for the tech illiterate that's fine—the real problem is that their hardware (and to a lesser extent some of their software) is actually a lot better than the competition, especially every since the M1 CPU came out.
So people like me and other HN denizens are left to hope that either some competitor actually becomes competitive; or Apple positions itself in such a way that they can simultaneously provide the "dummy mode" for dummies, and the "power mode" for people like me.
For the latter option, they clearly don't want to do it, probably not because they don't trust power users to do power user things; but because leaning on the dummies for cover helps them protect their walled garden.
Cue great frustration.
When customers aren't empowered to choose which company they engage with, companies should not be allowed to choose which customers they support.
They are late with most new tech as they will just wait until it becomes cheaper, why? Because they already know it's not a deal breaker.
They removed a bunch of fundamental and heavily used ports from the Macbook for years. Because they knew people would just work around it and buy dongles.
They put the charging port for their wireless mouse on the bottom of the mouse so it wasn't possible to charge and use the mouse at the same time. Because they knew people would put up with it because it was pretty.
For a lot of people, it's not that it works well or anything. It's about the brand and the design. It's about the marketing. And when it's about that and not the actual product you can do whatever you want to your product and it doesn't really matter. And compatibility with other brands doesn't matter because they've already bought into Apple's brand over everything else including basic functionality.
This statement doesn't make sense except if you are implying that Android doesn't have reasonable security despite not being a walled garden like iOS, and allowing e.g. interactions with smartwatches.
There's extremely few reasons why a modern Android phone from Google or Samsung is less secure than an iPhone, against any attack vector that 99.sevennines% of people [1] would ever experience. The worst way I've ever seen the most tech-illiterate person ever mess up an Android phone is by installing some QR Code reader that took over as a home screen launcher so it could (nonmaliciously, but questionably) put its QR code reader as a home screen left of the app icons. It should be way harder for Play Store apps to do that, because this guy needed professional help (me) to figure out where his home screen layout went.
But that was it. That's the worst I've ever seen. Android's security is very good.
While not a security concern, I've had multiple iPhone users ask "what the heck is this screen to the right of my app icons" (referring to the App Library introduced ~2 years ago). One person thought they'd been hacked. Kind of a similar inconvenience vector as that QR code app.
[1] The 100-99.sevenines% of people who might actually find themselves the target of an attack vector that Apple's unique security can help mitigate are, for example, journalists or dissidents who find value in Advanced Data Protection and Apple's generally very good and healthy stance on cloud security and end-to-end encryption. This level of security should be available to everyone, on every cloud provider, even if it only directly advantages a small number of people, but Apple is the only one really doing this right now.
I'd say more like 95-99% of humanity tbh.
I mostly want my phone to just work.
I finally understand what exactly I dislike in Apple. It's an authoritarian company.
Customers are interested in new products and services that are good. This is how all currently popular products began, obviously. By preventing competitors from being good, as Apple and Microsoft and Amazon and other mega corporations regularly do, there’s no chance for competition to get to the point of attracting customers in the first place. Those people that you think are not interested in one thing or the other COULD want those things if they were allowed and easy to do without all these anti competitive practices.
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).
An MDM administrator, managing a computer or device owned by an organization, cannot grant those permissions to anything without user consent. For good reason!
So why the *fuck* does Apple think they're entitled to?
Because they manufactured the device, and you bought it?
And honestly, I support them. Because starting QuickTime is a user action, and it only records when I want it to. QuickTime is an app I trust.
I don't trust an organization admin not to record me without my consent. As we've heard the horror stories of schools spying on students with school laptops while they're in their own homes, their own bedrooms.
I trust Apple a whole lot more than I trust an org admin.
First it was denied, then it was a bug, then it was a "temporary workaround" while ... something ... was updated.
And that was just ... accepted as an answer. I could never fathom why TextEdit might need a kernel extension in the first place, let alone unfettered/unmonitored network access. I don't even think it was necessarily nefarious, just "we know best, shut up and buy".
Now, replace ‘Apple’ with ‘malware author’. What’s the difference? Well, for one, a hacker has nothing to lose and everything to gain from snooping on your webcam. Meanwhile, if Apple mishandles this permission or used it to beam video data to HQ, there’s a high likelihood hundreds of millions of dollars of iPhone or Mac customers are lost, resulting in billions of dollars in stock value loss.
QuickTime Player is already on your Mac and you already know what it does when you launch it.
I'm not saying it's not anti-competitive but it's fine from a security context. Apple knows exactly how Quicktime behaves, that it doesn't act maliciously, and can't be updated to do so.
This is what I like most about them! Just pick something that you think is good. If I like what you pick I'll keep buying from you.
...but the Apple ecosystem has the best tech. M chips, AirPods Pro, Apple Watch, iPad, Pencil, I mean the tech is great.
Apple isn't monopolizing anything. They're competing like hell and winning because their tech is best. The real question is why the Android and Microsoft ecosystems don't do better at improving their tech. Where's the Windows equivalent of an M4 MacBook Air in terms of performance and battery life?
I got fed up with the walled gardens enough that I made a macOS app to transfer files to and from Android devices using Google's Quick Share protocol (that I had to reverse engineer first).
And no, don't suggest me to try desktop Linux. I want to use my system, not maintain it.
Sold that laptop, and have never touched anything apple since. Probably never will. The hardware's good, everything else is an embarrassing mess.
Sent from my Ubuntu.
I'm pretty sure I have also launched Apple Music accidentally with some keyboard button or touchbar action. For a "premium" device having to close Apple Music (effectively an ad) a few times a week is not acceptable.
But Apple sure won't, seeing as Music.app conveniently displays a modal advertisement for Apple Music when it launches.
Silly defaults. At what point does it stop being silly and start being a dark pattern?
https://github.com/tombonez/noTunes
this will prevent itunes/apple music from opening
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...?
On the margin, it probably does annoy some people enough to do something about it. And even though Apple's policy on this isn't enough to move me, if you combine it with my other annoyances about Apple products, eventually the sum will be enough.
And we vocalize stuff like this because switching does have a cost that I'd rather not pay, so hopefully people who can make a change at Apple will see the discontent and fix it so that I don't have to pay the switching cost.
You can't expect that everyone who is bothered by an issue switch away from a platform. The switching cost is significant (and Apple works hard to make it as high as possible). Not to mention that the platforms (really one notable competitor) that they are considering switching to also have [def] and [ghi] that the user doesn't like which is also counterbalancing the decision.
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.
This is only getting attention now because these new Pebble devices are offering an Apple Watch alternative people actually want.
see this discussion, for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/AppleWatch/comments/1h6qmrw/spotify...
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.
But the EU is a blunt instrument that needs to be sharpened sufficiently with explicit facts. And then still, possibly a very slow instrument...
As for the US justice system.....not sure whether there is any interest to pursue such a case these days...
In a ideal world US would lead the way, as it's the most influential market especially for US companies. But I don't expect this to happen...
I'm 100% certain that if 3rd party watches could integrate like apple watch could, that apple watch could be way better. But the lack of alternatives conceals how mediocre of a product it became. I wish apple wasn't such a control freak.
Readers might be interested in our Ultimate iOS to GrapheneOS Migration Guide and Review:
https://blog.okturtles.org/2024/06/the-ultimate-ios-to-graph...
Actually, let me make this worse. iOS has plenty of IPC, you're just not allowed to define your own IPC protocols. IPC is solely for your app to talk to Apple's code, not for apps to talk to each other.
https://www.engadget.com/2013-02-14-hack-brings-all-iphone-n...
https://github.com/conradev/btnotificationenabler
This has been a problem for a long time.
iMessage has been targeted for years with zero click exploits, most notably by the NSO group.
Apple’s restrictions aren’t meant to protect consumers, their purpose is to protect Apple’s profits.
While I still keep the Mac for professional purpose, I move over to fedora.
Or maybe reality is the opposite. That android phones that are supported by their vendor for maybe a year or two, have terrible battery life, allow any and all spyware, and generally suck aren't really comparable to the iPhone which effectively does the exact opposite? Or do you love being the product at Google?
The fact you cannot build a competing watch is unacceptable and the idea that "well go build one for Android" is refusing to acknowledge that Apple is its own market in and of itself.
Throw in the fact that even getting an app that isn't a game into the App store is not trivial, especially if it dares include some form of payment processing outside of the Apple-verse.
The Floatplane Saga, where Linus Tech Tips didn't want to use Apple payment processor because they would have to charge 30% more is another example. It took months and dozens of app resubmissions, only to have to use their massive YouTuber influence to get into contact with someone at Apple should be proof enough that the App Store has gone too far.
It's not like Apple started off letting third party watches work well and then suddenly locked them out (but you could argue from the article that they started off with minor handicaps and have increased the level of handicap over the years). Most people choose to buy iPhones knowing that only certain watch options work. It's not like anyone is suing Ford or Dodge for only making accessories that work on their own cars and trucks. It's not like anyone can legitimately complain that Ford is anticompetitive because they aren't making themselves compatible with Dodge oil filters.
If Apple did something anticompetitive to keep Android options from being good, then you probably have a winnable legal case. But it seems like Google, Samsung, and the other Android players are losing on their own merits.
Apple is its own market from the perspective of app developers. The app developers can only get to iPhone users through the Apple App Store, so restricting access and charging high fees is anti-trust.
Apple uses their dominant position in the smartphone market to exert leverage over the smartwatch market and block other companies' access to a huge chunk of potential smartwatch buyers. Reduced addressable market->reduced potential returns->reduced investment->worse products for everyone.
This same pattern hurts Apple users as well because Apple can reduce their investment, increase prices, or both, without worrying about being beaten on quality or price.
> Most people choose to buy iPhones knowing that only certain watch options work.
This statement would be true if iPhone had 0.1% or 99.9% marketshare and is on its own irrelevant to whether or not it should be regulated. The whole point of regulating companies with dominant market positions is that they have tools to force customers into sub-optimal outcomes regardless of whether or not the customer recognizes it beforehand.
> If Apple did something anticompetitive to keep Android options from being good, then you probably have a winnable legal case. But it seems like Google, Samsung, and the other Android players are losing on their own merits.
This ignores the dozens of Smartwatch companies that don't have a smartphone business to integrate with. In your view, what should Garmin have done if the major Android players blocked 3rd party feature parity from the beginning along with Apple? Would Garmin need to make their own smartphone and OS to compete for watch sales, or would their product just not exist? Would that be good or bad for the industry?
Apple actually acts as a gatekeeper to the smart watch market when used with their devices, because they provide core platform services as a gateway for these products to operate and communicate with end-users, but define rules and restrictions which don't apply for Apple smart watches themselves.
> Apple is its own market from the perspective of app developers.
Exactly. They create a market while giving themselves preferential treatment. They do the same with smart watches, therefore not ensuring a level playing field in that market.
> If Apple did something anticompetitive to keep Android options from being good, then you probably have a winnable legal case.
But isn't that's the case Pebble is making here?
There is actually a Wear OS iOS App from Google to connect Android Wear devices with iPhones, and beside the fact that it's not possible to connect any non-Apple Watch to the iPhone without manually installing a separate App, Google is not able to provide the same functionality as Apple Watch does even when incorporating such a companion app.
You're conflating two different things here.
One is, are their oil filters compatible? That isn't a problem; they can be incompatible. They're often incompatible even with other vehicles from the same manufacturer. Larger engines need larger oil filters etc.
The other is, does the company prohibit compatibility? If a new company wants to make engines but not oil filters, so they make a car engine compatible with existing Ford oil filters, or someone wants to make oil filters for Fords even though they're not Ford, does Ford do anything to inhibit this? In general they do not, and if they did, that very much should be an antitrust violation.
No it's not; GP didn't even address this. Competition sucks, and that is Apple's (and Google's) fault.
> Most people choose to buy iPhones knowing that only certain watch options work.
I'm sure that's not true. Most people choose to buy an iPhone because it's an iPhone. No one is going to buy an iPhone because Apple Watch works and Garmin watches don't work (as well).
Certainly some people buy an iPhone because they also want to buy an Apple Watch (which I assume doesn't really work well or at all with Android), but I think that's a minority of purchasers. They by an iPhone because of the iPhone itself.
> It's not like Apple started off letting third party watches work well and then suddenly locked them out (but you could argue from the article that they started off with minor handicaps and have increased the level of handicap over the years).
I feel like your parenthetical refutes any point you were trying to make in the prior sentence. The first part of your sentence is irrelevant. While it does take work to standardize public APIs, it also takes work to lock things down and choose what subset of functions third parties are allowed to access. The fact of crippling third-party smartwatch access is anti-competitive behavior.
This is the same shit we went through in the 90s with Microsoft, but many people here are too young to remember what that was like. MS gave their own apps (Office, IE, etc.) access to private, undocumented Windows APIs that let them provide a better experience than similar third-party apps could provide. The US government and courts decided that was illegal. It should be illegal for Apple to do so as well. (And before you start quoting relative market share numbers between MS in the 90s and Apple now, I don't think that's relevant. You shouldn't need a monopoly in order to be restricted from anti-competitive behavior.)
> But it seems like Google, Samsung, and the other Android players are losing on their own merits.
That's a naive explanation for complex social phenomena. Android doesn't suck. It's fine. Very good even. But it's not enough to be good, or even excellent in today's markets. You need incumbency, lock-in, social capital, and, yes... anti-competitive behavior.
And to be clear, Android manufacturers are not losing. In most places outside the US, Android is the dominant operating system.
But! This isn't about Android winning or losing. It's not about Android at all. It's about companies like Pebble and Garmin being hobbled in the iOS smartwatch market because of Apple's anti-competitive practices. Android is irrelevant to this.
Edit : more up to date and useful comments thankfully below
What's amazing to me is how much things have changed since the Microsoft antitrust saga: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
MS also did a lot to curtail competition that Apple hasn't even come close to. Like how they crippled BeOS by threatening OEMs with higher Windows licensing costs (as a low-margin business this would have pushed any OEM prices too high to remain competitive).
Is the market iOS devices or smart phones?
I think the definition of "market" is usually one of the most difficult questions to answer in anti-trust litigation.
Apple has less than 100% market share for phones. Apps and phone accessories are not phones, they're separate products made by separate entities.
If Apple phones and Android phones were compatible then the apps would be addressing the same market. For example, phones from Samsung and phones from Xiaomi both run the same apps, so they're in the same market. However, phones from Apple and phones from Samsung do not run the same apps. They're different markets. And Apple has a monopoly on the former.
Comparing mobile phones to toasters, ovens and gaming consoles is disingenuous.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/203734/global-smartphone...
[2] https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mob...
From Apple's docs: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102842
"Message Access Profile (MAP 1.4)
This profile is compatible with iPhone 5s and later.
Message Access Profile allows devices to exchange messages. It's used to receive incoming message notifications on connected vehicles. iOS and iPadOS support these MAP functions on connected vehicles:
- Receive incoming message notifications
- Reply to incoming messages
- Compose new messages
- Browse message inbox
- Mark messages as read"
The documentation talks about "connected vehicles", but can totally be implemented by any Bluetooth accessory.
>•..
>•..
>•Not provide a user interface for sending messages. Devices do not support sending messages using MAP.
From: “Accessory Design Guidelines for Apple Devices” [0]
[0] https://www.bluetooth.com/wp-content/uploads/attachments/Blu...
They aren’t innovating inside the walled garden anymore.
Privacy is a real issue and Tim Cook deserves credit for his stance, but if apple gave devs good apis security and privacy could actually be enhanced throughout the ecosystem.
But after hearing repebble's complaints about not being able to do things that Garmin can do, I almost wonder if different vendors may be given different private api exceptions or something (just guessing, not an ios dev).
They arent the best, they are never 1st, they are 2nd or third or beyond.
Instead they found niches in marketing. Read the word "Security" or "Privacy" in white and black text in their commercials, no actual claims on either. Just the words. They have stylish products with their celebrities, dancing people, and blue bubbles. None add to the strength to the product. In the LLM world, they've tricked people into thinking 'unified RAM' and integrated video cards are equivalent to an Nvidia GPU.
Specifically on topic, iPhones seemed to always under perform in features. This is yet another example.
Their track record makes it obvious, but most consumers won't notice. That is why the deception works. I used to be an Android Zealot who preached the immorality of Apple, but I genuinely stopped caring that other people were making mistakes and Apple was exploiting them. If anything, I take notes personally how to be more like Apple, save my strength and get positive outcomes.
I ran rooted android phones for a long time, but have for the past few years been on GrapheneOS, which doesn't require Google Play, but allows you to use it while sandboxing it (so, harm reduction), and it's much less of a struggle now than it used to be.
The catch is that, at least currently, GrapheneOS only works on (Google) Pixel phones.
[On Kobos:— I agree on Kobo vs Kindle, and like Kobos a lot: but partially because I don't actually have to use Kobo's software if I don't want to. (See KOReader[0] and NickelMenu[1].)
I'm still recommending Apple to family members (less support needed from me, and I can always say I have Android and can't use apple so I can't help). But you have to go all in. If you want non apple stuff, just use something else. And if you can use Linux etc., why are you using Apple? Other then being lazy, which is totally ok.
It's not OK. This collective laziness and convenience is our number one enemy. People don't want to be responsible, they want some corporation to manage everything so they don't have to think about stuff.
We need more people to take responsibility and use Linux and free software and hardware. Owning the computing system means being responsible for it, and we need to get people to accept that responsibility. The less of us there are, the more business and financial sense it makes for them to just straight up ignore us as some irrelevant vocal minority.
We should all own our computers, and there should be so many of us that they have to suck it up because not doing so means they take a big hit to their profits.
What are you seeing in the world that would led you to think the average Joe can use Linux without someone like us supporting them? Maybe not day to day but they are absolutely going to run into pain points like “Netflix is low quality” or “I need to install this windows app for this new gizmo I bought”.
It’s a fantasy world that Linux desktop is good enough for most people, it just is. I love Linux and use it on all my servers but come on.
You can just say that you don't have enough time or spoons to do free tech support.
They are so damn hostile to any third party integration, reserve apis for first party usage, and give middle finger to developers with their abusive fee structure (Apple takes a 30% cut …).
Only thing left is for my devices to age out (I am in deep with phone, watch, mbp, mba, and even Mac Studio M1 “ultra”)
The Apple razor: "Never attribute to security that which can be adequately be explained by incompetence."
Ble is a type of network communication that is only used for short distances, in order to save energy. We’re talking about a few meters, here.
The goal of the feature would be for people to pair their device with their iphone, something which users can do explicitly, ensuring that only their device works with their iphone.
Pairing an iphone with a third party device is already something that apple does, for instance in the case of personal hotspot.
Over BLE, it is possible to receive and delete notifications, as well as view and control media playback/volume/metadata.
Apple would never give Meta access to private APIs. Eric has access to everything that the Meta View app is doing.
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 are totally shut out.
[0] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/bundleresources/en...
What you can't do is reply to a text without using voice, which is what I'd like.
And then the same in the other direction.
Interesting. This indicates that the inability for my Amazfit Balance to do this is indeed an artificial limitation, and not something that Apple prevents. <https://np.reddit.com/r/amazfit/comments/1j3ftbr/why_cant_ba...>
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?
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.
It's impossible to argue that this isn't intentional and to make the case that this isn't impacting competition, innovation and consumer choice here.
Hopefully someone takes Apple to task over this. If it can be done on Android without jeopardizing the security or optimizations of the phone - it can be done on iOS.
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/117767
Might be possible to do more (like call private apis) when apps don't need to pass app review.
You also still need to pay $100/year developer fee for your app to continue to be side-loadable (otherwise they revoke the notarization), and need to pay the €0.50 "core technology fee" per side-load to apple after a free allowance of side-loads.
I doubt it's going to help pebble since they'll have to pay more for users to side-load the app than to install it from the app store.
My wife loves her Garmin as it's just a better sports watch than an Apple Watch, no matter what Apple say, but the integration with the iPhone is poor.
It's about time Apple opened up integration with 3rd party watches. They could still vet it with human-reviewed capabilities, the same as they do with Tap to Pay with iPhone and Family Sharing APIs, but they choose not to.
Does that mean some vendors will be treated unfairly? Of course.
Does it mean Apple users will remain happy? Absolutely.
If there is one OS that is anti-tinkering by design it is iOS, and yet people keep criticizing this intentional design decision that forms a large part of Apple’s moat.
It's not reasonable to make a blanket absolutist statement like that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System
PS, why keep people defending this locked down consumer brand?
For example, could you build an app that would not pass app store review, that would be able to send SMS or manipulate notifications? If so you could just "install" it yourself with Xcode.
What type of company do you people think Apple is, one that pleases hackers at the expense of their competition?
As someone who uses Apple because of their MO is not selling everything about me to advertisers this is great news.
From the other recently-posted article, the new Pebble watches are targeting 30-day battery lives between charges. That would be unthinkable for a watch that manages its own wifi/cellular connections.
One, adding hardware to connect to WiFi and cellular increases size and power requirements. Notably, the new Pebble 's battery is projected to last 30 days.
Two, people use phones. They want their watch to work with their phone instead of around it.
Am I old or do people have higher expectations now?
Apple has lots of options at their disposal to frustrate any attempts to reverse engineer their APIs, and have shown they're willing to go above and beyond in defending their walled garden. If all else fails, every Apple device newer than 2018 has a secure enclave and verified boot, so they could just enforce an encrypted channel between the enclave - which will be able to attest that the device is running latest iOS or macOS with all DRM measures enabled - and iMessage servers. The only reason they don't do that already is the number of users on older devices, but that number gets lower and lower each year.
I got around Europe with a CA-53W. I did currency conversion, and had an alarm so I didn't have to leave my phone unattended in a 10 bed hostel.
I find my mind is clearer not using these things, not constantly bombarded with pings, and instead mindfully checking the phone occasionally to see if I missed any texts.
The easiest solution is to buy Apple Watch.
Lastly, ignore or dismiss any evidence that invalidates your preconceived conclusions, like the fact that these "floodgates" have always been open [1] and yet people credit non-existent floodgates for solving the spam problem.
Anecdotally, the amount of spam I receive across Signal and Telegram is zero, and SMS is very close to 0, maybe one SMS every few weeks.
[1] https://documenter.getpostman.com/view/765844/UV5RnfwM#0d8e0...
Edit: wait, is this this imessage thing about coloring messages by transport method? I never used/saw it so didn't immediately recognise what you meant, if this is what you meant
Their absolute lockdown nature simply makes them inferior devices, and sorry but, any excuse for non-free general purpose computers and (esp.)phones is seriously asinine.
- Swift UI layer for Apple-compliant UI/UX
- Zig core library (as XCFramework) for watch communication
- Data processing WebAssembly runtime for watchface interpretation
This avoids Pebble's original JS compiler workaround while still enabling customizable watchfaces within Apple's restrictions
The WASM engine stays within App Store guidelines by interpreting watchfaces as data rather than executable code
TL;DR to avoid this:
iOS App (Swift UI) <-> Zig Core Library (XCFramework) <-> WebAssembly Runtime (for watchfaces)
(Note: This isn't because Apple is without faults. iOS and macOS are both a mess right now, and iPadOS is even worse. I just think that Android is worse than that, and I know many, many Apple users are in the same boat)
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.
As a few examples
* (almost all) bought apps don't transfer
* bought media (music, etc) and how that integrates into the software
* icloud and other account services
* replacing your phone + laptop + watch + IOT devices which may all be in the apple ecosystem.
So one can easily see how folks who have bought in are willing to put up with user-hostile actions.
Of course, Apple is not the only company that uses integration as a way to retain customers. However, from personal experience, I feel Android is a bit more open (at the cost of a more fractured experience). I can definitely understand the pros of not having to deal with carrier installed garbage when purchasing a device.
There's no technical reason it needs to be this way. Apple just prefers to be anti-competitive and increase their profits, than to give their users the as-close-to-ideal experience they want.
I long for a better alternative, but until then, yeah, here I am accepting my current PineTime is... a little bit worse, until Tim Sweeney manages to bust up Tim Cook's little garden.
I don’t want crap, I don’t want spyware, I don’t want spam.
If I did, id buy the insecure cheap plastic crap that the android ecosystem is.
uhhh and if there wasn't any reviewing, every update would come with a risk of malware to the users.
eh. nowadays it’s easier, at least in the EU
If the functionality isn't available to anyone, fine, so be it. If the functionality exists on the Apple Watch, it should be done through an API.
----
> he’s going to opine about how Apple is “anti-competitive,” and “evil,”
Complete with obligatory Trump mention.
I haven't owned a Pebble but have long heard how nice they are. That said, this is wrong:
>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.
My Amazfit Balance lets me dismiss iOS notifications. I don't know how Amazfit's Zepp app enables this functionality; all I know is that it works.
Its integration with iOS is not ideal or complete; for example, although I can take and make phone calls with its mic and speaker, I can't talk to Siri through it despite my ancient $20 running headset being able to do so. But Balance's other advantages are more than enough for me to go with it over an Apple Watch.
> It’s impossible for a 3rd party smartwatch to [...] or perform actions on notifications (like dismissing, muting
REALLY? Why not RTFM?
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Co...
>Notification Actions
> Starting with iOS 8.0, the NP can inform the NC of potential
> actions that are associated with iOS notifications. On the
> user’s behalf, the NC can then request the NP to perform an
> action associated with a specific iOS notification.
These API have exited for over a decade and plenty of other wearables use them. Yes there are some limits, but many fewer than the original article implies to create outrage
This is a false, and very strange, dichotomy.
Agree or disagree with what he's saying, he sounds like a petulant child
X restricts Y from being awesome.
Apple also restricts me from being awesome because they didn't give me a million dollar.
I get what the message is and I think I agree with Pebble on the iPhone being more closed off, but putting the blame on some outside thing for yourself not being awesome just feels immature.
It's just as easy to turn it around: by developing the iPhone in the first place and getting it in the hands of a lot of people, Apple makes it possible for Pebble to be at least close to awesome.
Please read what you wrote yourself, and put yourself in the shoes of someone who might actually be affected. If you cant think of any failure cases ("edge cases", in programming parlance), please read on -
You've essentially reduced every monopolistic tendancies companies exhibit into a positive thing.
- Amazon restricting smaller third-party vendors - according to you, not a problem - Microsoft ensuring their favored browser (IE) is successful unfairly - according to you, not a problem.
Those are just 2 examples I could think of at the top of my head.
This is a disingenuous argument. The two are nothing alike. One is about how they artificially limit their platform for their own dominance, and the other is literally just giving away money. One hurts consumers and competitors, the other is a nonsense expectation that no reasonable person has.
It's all just software. You can download IPA files onto your iPhone, just not install them without an arbitrary feature-flag enabled.
Like, what in particular? I use Macs for both personal and work activities (software eng) and MacOS has been vastly superior to both Ubuntu and Windows I used before.
0 blue screen type of issues, zero hardware incompatibility, zero issues after system updates (looking at you Ubuntu!).
Up to that paragraph I sympathized. Sometimes it does feel like Apple doesn’t care one bit about me, an iOS developer. But, as a user, I really don’t care what phones the devs use. I use an iPhone and now I feel like I‘d be a second class citizen because of this paragraph. Not because Apple’s restrictions are unnecessarily bad, but because the devs just care less. I guess I‘d go for an Apple Watch instead.
(Was a first gen Pebble owner btw)
Is it really surprising that developers who love building third party accessories would choose Android?
