Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones(ericmigi.com) |
Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones(ericmigi.com) |
As someone who uses Apple because of their MO is not selling everything about me to advertisers this is great news.
Would it have been better if they did it sooner? Sure! But the iPhone has currently had officially supported content-blocking for longer than it lacked it.
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
That's the important bit. I personally don't see the value in a wifi/cellular watch when I already carry a phone that has wifi and cellular.
I get a lot of value in a watch with extended batter life. For example, I don't need to pack a dedicated watch charger when I travel.
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].)
It's not a great solution - you still have very little freedom, Amazon frequently patches root methods - and you might be waiting months for someone to find a working root method, and if you accidentally update - bye bye, root/KOReader.
But it is a solution.
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.
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.
Sideloading would at least allow JIT compilation.
The fee only applies to alternative app stores, not simple apps.
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?
And you don't need to be a strict monopoly to be subject to antitrust law.
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?
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?
My sincere wish is for "average Joes" to stop being so average. I want them to start taking responsibility for their systems so that we can all enjoy the freedom that brings. Freedom to own the computers and do whatever we want with them, not just what the corporations allow us to do.
If they keep choosing the convenient fiefdom, it's going to destroy everything the word "hacker" ever stood for.
The average Joe also faces pain points on Windows.
When Unix was the norm, everyday employees knew how to navigate a shell. In highschool I had a friend working at the bank. You know what she did all day? Ran SQL queries to make reports. No degree. She wasn’t a programmer. She was a financial analyst.
Now we have people constructing database systems in an excel workbook on a share drive somewhere, but even that’s fading. Now we have people creating systems in Discord and spending 20 hours a week moving data from point A to point B. Tasks that someone 20 years ago could trivially automate. They don’t know how anymore.
We have lawyers paying 20 paralegals to maintain and consolidate a document shared between 10 parties with 50 revisions floating around. We’ve had version control for decades. They refuse to learn. They would rather spend the enormous amounts of man hours doing what is essentially manual labor.
It’s clear that computers are a huge part of our lives. You can learn to use them or you can burn hours - but you can’t opt out.
I mean, Jesus Christ kids these days don’t know what a directory is. We had a short window of computer literate everyday people and then poof! Gone! But the need for computers is still here. And we can’t quite talk to them and tell them what to do yet.
Windows? Provided it doesn’t shit the bed, which it often does, things change randomly for no reason and beyond your control. One day you boot up and boom - the UI for x, y, z is different. And there goes 10 hours spread over the next month while you relearn.
iOS is fairly decent about this too.
But it's perfectly possible to just use Linux and not muck around. Or, at least, to spend less time unwillingly mucking around than one would elsewhere.
(E.g., EndeavourOS, which is, perhaps unexpectedly/ironically, more or less just Arch with a nice installer and a welcome screen, is one of the easiest OSes to deal with. [Maybe not completely unexpectedly, SteamOS is also a customised Arch.] It's not the exciting distro, or the one I'm most likely to talk a lot about; but see the first point.)
"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...
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.
Let me spell it out again for you: the wording of the title irks me the wrong way.
If you have anything to reply, than reply to that.
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?
Hardly useable for a message reply.
In this case, Apple is 100% exhibiting those tendencies. They are not acting maliciously, but their actions have that effect.
Android is fine. It has some downsides vs. iOS, and some advantages. But that isn't the point. The point is that to make a new smartphone OS (or even one that's based on Android, but is independent of the Google ecosystem) that can do everything Android and iOS can do is an undertaking that few would even bother to take on. That's not due to technical challenges, it's due to market barriers that Apple and Google have erected. (IMO, the sorts of things that we as citizens in a healthy society should not allow corporations to do.)
And those that (sorta?) do try to make a competing OS, like LineageOS, GrapheneOS, CalyxOS, etc., end up with far less-capable phones than a Google-blessed Android phone. (And when most/all of those capabilities are present, it's through brittle hacks and compromises that basically turn the phone into an imitation of the Google-blessed phone, with many of the downsides intact.)
Put another way, it's not Apple's or Google's responsibility to make things more competitive, but it is their responsibility to not make things anti competitive, and it is their fault when alternatives don't exist because of their anti-competitive behavior.
>The NC must neither assume nor try to guess in advance the exact action performed on an iOS Notification, because these actions are based upon information unavailable to it, as well as other factors such as the ANCS version implemented by the NP. The NP guarantees that positive and negative actions are associated with results that do not surprise the user.
So pebble app can’t explicitly say dismiss or mute but has to hope that the phone does that action on a given notification.
Imagine the app says dismiss but the phone‘s real action is just a snooze.
Press X to maybe dismiss doesn’t sound like a great functionality, does it.
They claim that Apple imposes restrictions on every non-Apple watch. Users then prefer the Apple Watch not because Apple made it better but because Apple made all other watches worse.
If you are frustrated that Pebble takes longer to develop around artificial restrictions, I would direct those frustrations at the company creating the restrictions not at Pebble.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...
Microsoft, post-antitrust action, made a very careful point of ensuring new functionality in first-party products like Office only used things that had public APIs.
I’m glad that antitrust enabled a rich ecosystem of Microsoft Office alternatives and competitors.
When Apple goes up against governments over encryption, I'll cheer them on with everyone else. When Apple is engaging in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce) , I have zero sympathy for them.
Most people pretend that all that effort is free and trivial to expose as API.
OEMs and carriers shove in their own apps (Samsung is especially bad about this: I don't want two apps for photos, and files, and messages, and calling, and browsing, etc etc). You can (sometimes) disable or uninstall them, but they can pop up again after updates, and I don't want to have to clean up my device just to use it.
And visually, apps look and feel radically different, all over the place. There are apps that still look like they're running on Jelly Bean, apps that use modern material designs, apps that roll their own UI, and web apps in wrappers. Every new app I have to learn how to use it. This is an occasional problem on iOS, but it's very rare compared to my experience with it on Android.
I also don't see iOS and Android having much of a usability gap. At this point, they have very similar feature sets, and the UX is fairly well-polished, even on Android -- where yes, it took them a lot longer to get there. For the most part, if you think that either platform has bad UX, it's probably just because you've used the other one for so long, and you're used to it. (I don't think iPhone usability is bad, but on the rare occasion I do something on my wife's iPhone, I find it frustrating because it just works differently than my Android phone.)
At this point I think most (US; can't speak for other countries) iPhone users are there mainly because they've always been there, and there's fairly strong lock-in and switching costs. And iPhones are still something of a status symbol, not to mention unnecessary Apple-created problems like the "blue bubble envy" nonsense.
Or perhaps it's because we like iPhones?
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).
This is not my experience. Perhaps 3-5 years ago was the peak of SMS spam, but I still regularly (1/week minimum) get one of the various "package delivery" | "tax refund" | "diesel emissions" scam/spam texts.
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.
This is 90% of humanity, including people we all know and love.
Apple serves these people pretty well.
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).
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?
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...?
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.
2. i can transfer files by just plugging in my phone to any usb
3. better battery, i can go to 0% plug in and in 30 seconds turn my phone on. on iphone i have to wait at least 30 minutes.
4. actual innovation in hardware like a foldable
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.
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...
From a technical standpoint, there is no limitation for an accessory to implement the profile.
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.
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).
As a hardware vendor, you'd achieve "trusted" status by having a decades-long track record of not doing these things.
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!
> get text notifications on my watch for any [...] apps that provide notifications, and relevant ones (like text messages, whether SMS or RCS [or iMessage])
I get this behaviour on iOS+Garmin, and can both see notification text (even when phone is locked and notification content hidden on lock screen) + can dismiss notifications just fine with "Clear" action (both points noted in the article as not being possible)
Fair enough though, I just can't reply or take a specific action in actionable notifications.
Media play pause next prev work as well, and calendars are all viewable too.
Widgets that use the phone+app as proxy for network access also just work (e.g weather refreshes, or I have a Home Assistant widget which hits my self-hosted instance just fine)
Apart from replying I don't have a hobbled experience at all.
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
The law doesn't care why they choose to do it. The result of the decision is what constitutes illegal monopoly behavior.
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.
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 care about privacy and freedom, so they have different opinions besides Apple. But they don’t care that much, so not everyone is trying to figure out if their phones have a hackable toggle.
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.
This happened to people I know. Some innocent sounding app replaced their launcher and added a fake Gmail widget to their home screen. It prompted them to login and, well, you know the rest.
This would never happen on iOS because you can't change the launcher.
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.
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?
Apple technology is "great" as long as you you're rich enough to afford it, and buy into the whole ecosystem. And, most crucially: contort yourself yourself enough. (="If it's not working for you, you're not holding it right.")
The software has taken a nosedive though and Android has overtaken iPhone in many (most?) aspects.
You aren't in any position to make that call, since you have no opportunity to try competing products due to being locked in to an anticompetitive ecosystem. European iOS users will soon be able to decide if Apple really does have the best tech or not.
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.
https://github.com/tombonez/noTunes
this will prevent itunes/apple music from opening
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.
There is no equal opportunity to compete in the market of iOS users if you try to compete with Apple.
I think that's part of the problem.
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.
Apple deliberately makes this non-obvious, but it is disclosed here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651
> Messages in iCloud is end-to-end encrypted when iCloud Backup is disabled. When iCloud Backup is enabled, your backup includes a copy of the Messages in iCloud encryption key to help you recover your data. If you turn off iCloud Backup, a new key is generated on your device to protect future Messages in iCloud. This key is end-to-end encrypted between your devices and isnʼt stored by Apple
And is the backup end-to-end encrypted? No, not by default, as disclosed on the same page. It is encrypted "In transit & on server" with keys stored by Apple, which means Apple can decrypt it. And they do, as mentioned earlier, for purposes other than "to help you recover your data". The non-default Advanced Data Protection feature is required to get end-to-end encryption of the backup.
Note that Google's equivalent Android backup feature has been end-to-end encrypted by default for many, many years. Plus, alternative backup solutions are allowed to exist on Android.
Doesn't the boundary get broken asking messages be read to me into a BT audio device?
So maybe we should look at our definition of computer in this context. As almost everything contains software programmable controllers these days, that cannot be the definition.
Funny, because the overwhelming majority of people and systems exist outside of it and are doing just fine. This sounds like the sentiment of a crab in a bucket who's feeling quite safe from the sides since it was caught.
Do you think “the masses” should not use web browsers or third party apps?
Yes they did, when they said they were amazed that Apple dodged anti-trust lawsuits. I said that from the rest of their post it seemed like they acknowledged that competition existed, they just didn't want to use Android options. The legitimate anti-trust example they gave (LTT/Floatplane) is from an app developer perspective (not a smart phone and watch buyer), which is why I talked about that.
> 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).
I didn't say that people buy iPhones because other watch brands don't work well, I said that they buy iPhones knowing that the other watch brands didn't work, and it still doesn't deter them. But they had the information available when they made their choice.
> I feel like your parenthetical refutes any point you were trying to make in the prior sentence.
No, I said it's not like they totally changed course from being welcoming to other brands to locking them out. They were always hostile to other smartwatch makers, but I acknowledged that the article mentions that they may have gotten more hostile in recent years. Acknowledging that their hostility may exist on a spectrum doesn't refute the point that they've always been hostile to other smartwatch brands. I love that in your next paragraph you include a parenthetical that could refute your own argument though- market share is absolutely relevant. Nobody is going to bother suing a small fry over anti-competitive behavior with 0.01% market share in a healthy competitive market- the market takes care of that issue on its own.
> Android doesn't suck. It's fine. Very good even. ... It's not about Android at all
This article is partly about Android since "Apple is being restrictive" is in comparison to features that the Android API offers. They are saying that they are going to make an Apple app for the Pebble but it is not going to be as good as the Android experience.
But the market (and society at large) is ultimately worse off when Pebble and FitBit and Garmin can't compete on a level playing field with Apple Watch— particularly when Pebble is targeting a completely different feature set, price point, and battery profile from what Apple Watch does.
Software companies bend the knee to Apple.
Global payments companies bend the knee to Apple.
Entertainment companies bend the knee to Apple.
On and on and on...
You cannot find a corner of the world that iPhone does not distort, tax, shape, or control in some shape or fashion. Some companies and industries to such an extreme that Apple becomes not just their landlord, but their master.
Desktop computing could never do this. Microsoft never had such draconian rules.
The automotive market doesn't resemble this. Dozens of countries have five or six major automakers. There's something for every budget and niche.
Gaming could never do this. There are three major consoles, six major PC distribution channels, mobile gaming, indie gaming, web gaming, tabletop/physical gaming - that market is huge. Honestly, this is what mobile computing should look like.
Only mobile computing and the web have become so perverted and encumbered. These markets are beyond Standard Oil levels of distortion. And the worst part is how massive, important, and all-encompassing these markets are. Everything in life is touched by these markets.
Why? Can't you just not take advantage of it is it's there? Why demand it to not be here? What ill consequences do you suffer from having the option for additional interoperability?
You could install whatever you wanted on Windows. Any software, any browser. Microsoft was incredibly open with both software and hardware compatibility.
You didn't have to use IIS or C# or Microsoft technology to develop software. You could develop and deploy PHP, Apache, Perl, C, anything. And about that time, Linux servers and distribution were massively growing in popularity. There were so many options.
It was even easy to pirate Windows and other software if you really wanted to. Basically, it was a complete Wild West with lots of latitude and room to navigate for everyone. Microsoft really only pursued enterprise contracts.
And the market back then was incredibly small. The number of desktop broadband and dialup users pales in comparison to the total number of smartphone users we have today.
The situation today is wholly different on every level. Two companies own how society stays connected, how it conducts commerce, and how it shares information. It's gross how much power they have. And how they choose to enforce it and tax it.
And people wonder why piracy happens.
Why are you just blindly accepting their vapid evidenceless postulation lol
Do you trust Quicktime Player to be free of exploitable bugs or behaviors?
I trust they aren't there intentionally, and that they'll be patched in a security update as soon as Apple discovers them. In this regard, QuickTime is just part of the entire OS. No software is perfect. Bugs might be anywhere. But the permission dialogs are meant to protect the OS from third-party threats, not to protect the OS from Apple software.
So major government intervention.
They also don't make the Apple Watch compatible with Android, so they are also giving up their own access to a huge chunk of potential buyers (70% of worldwide smartphone users are on Android). So maybe we're missing something.
> In your view, what should Garmin have done if the major Android players blocked 3rd party feature parity from the beginning along with Apple?
In your view, what would happen if only one smart phone manufacturer ever offered any watch integration API? Would that make all of the others (who don't offer an API) anti-competitive? Or would they just have a worse value proposition for their products?
I can't believe this is the hill I'm going to die on- I'm not really an Apple fanboy, and I don't like some of the things they do (like 30% App Store fees or core technology fees in Europe). But I really don't see how Apple not opening up access to their phone constitutes anti-competitive practice. Companies are not obligated to deliver privileged access to their products. It's not a right you have to build a product off of someone else's product. The fact that they have opened up access in some categories does not make it anti-competitive that they didn't open up access in all categories. So many products are closed off in so many categories, why are we complaining about this time?
If smartwatches were an essential part of everyday life for the majority of people on the planet (or in <insert legal jurisdiction here>) as smartphones are then I would want regulation mandating interoperability there as well. As it is they are a relatively niche product so if Apple wants to limit the watch to their phones then I'm fine with that as I don't see it being a very powerful market distortion in the other direction.
> In your view, what would happen if only one smart phone manufacturer ever offered any watch integration API? Would that make all of the others (who don't offer an API) anti-competitive?
Only if those others have significant market penetration such that their closed API has the effect of harming consumer choice considerably in the smartwatch market.
> Companies are not obligated to deliver privileged access to their products. It's not a right you have to build a product off of someone else's product.
If you mean in principle, then IMO a sane legal system should absolutely confer some limited right to, for instance, build and sell software and hardware that runs on or interfaces with Windows. If you mean in practice, then it is absolutely a subject of debate in both the EU under DMA and the US under antitrust law:
> Connected devices are a varied, large and commercially important group of products, including smartwatches, headphones and virtual reality headsets. Companies offering these products depend on effective interoperability with smartphones and their operating systems, such as iOS. The Commission intends to specify how Apple will provide effective interoperability with functionalities such as notifications, device pairing and connectivity.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_...
https://siliconangle.com/2024/03/20/doj-sues-apple-antitrust...
I don’t know what point you’re trying to make with this sentence. It comes across as missing the fact that high quality goods… cost more than low quality ones?
Not to mention they have plenty of affordable tech. Their phones have always been roughly the same cost when adjusted for inflation - something pretty commendable. The iPods back in the day came in a huge range of affordable shapes and sizes for the quality.
(And high price and high quality may sometimes correlate, but high quality is obviously not definitionally high cost (nor vice-versa).)
1) Apple's lack of success in various categories over the years shows that their success isn't "magical" marketing.
2) So if we're ruling out mindless drones of hypnotised people handing over their hard earned cash hand-over-fist, then we might look to more realistic reasons why some of their products sell very well. When we do we see a much more rational picture, closely tied to the basic economics of product and price.
3) At this point one needs to concede that consumers are majority highly rational buyers, hand waving away others as sheep-like with too much money is a risible position to take.
4) In the markets Apple sell well: phones, laptops, wearables: There's plenty of products that cost more than the Apple equivalent and don't work nearly as well.
5) While you may categorise a person with a $700 phone as rich, consider that the lifestyle improvements gained over the typical 4 year ownership lifecycle works out to be ~48c a day. Depending where you are, that's the equivalent of buying one basic starbucks coffee a week. Sure there's more expensive iPhones, there's more expensive coffees too.
6) When it comes to price discussions there's also a lot of bad faith comparisons. Bad faith = where the author of the comment should, or clearly does know that the comparison they're making is excluding pertinent details, but doesn't include them intentionally to deceive, usually because they value "winning" an internet discussion rather than the value of exchanging ideas.
7) Consumers are rational: If such price comparisons held water then certain the Apple products wouldn't be doing so well. We can already see the ones that don't do well with the mass markets because they're priced to very specific audiences (MacPro, VisionPro, etc.)
>"If it's not working for you, you're not holding it right."
1) I'm not sure about the merit of misquoting a dead guy, talking about a product that hasn't been sold in over a decade. I think if you're trying to convey that Apple has a certain arrogant attitude towards their customers then you should revisit the points above.
2) If you're going to quote this, then you should take the time to read what Jobs actually wrote, since the tone doesn't meet the level of arrogance in your portrayal. The email is here: https://wccftech.com/images/news/iPhone4G/jobs.jpg
3) Despite the mixed views on whether the problem even existed in a meaningful way, Apple gave away free cases, no questions asked, to people who felt they experienced this problem. As a barometer to the actual problem: Not even the land of the lawsuit was able to muster a case, and they did appeal widely for injured parties.
Yes, it's physically impossible for an Apple developer to accidentally or maliciously introduce an exploit into QT and for it to elude security or code review...
I've never heard a security posture that is "well, we know what your tool does, so it doesn't need any security controls".
> well, we know what your tool does, so it doesn't need any security controls
This really isn't that weird. The camera app doesn't need to ask for permission to use the camera/mic. And the why is because the thing you're worried about is some random 3rd party app capturing audio/video without the user's knowledge or intent. You know the built-in camera app doesn't do that because you wrote it, so it's fine to give it an entitlement to bypass the usual prompts. It can also access your photos without prompts because the threat model is malicious exfiltration and again, you know it doesn't do that.
No, it’s not. For example, even if you know every device on your network you STILL need network segmentation.
Running your card readers and corporate computers on the same subnet is asking for trouble - regardless of if you control both.
Apple doesn't need outside ecosystem builders here; what is the business reason for them to add process expense, risk, and possibly incorporate timelines from other vendors into their supply chain?
As the many comments in this thread indicate, lots of people seem to feel Apple "owes it" to the world to open up. Happily, there is a (more) open ecosystem available with Android for people who value that. I don't think the tradeoffs Apple makes are perfect for me as a consumer, but I prefer them to the Android tradeoffs, and I can always switch when I like.
No, the case they are making is that Apple is making things worse for Apple users. They haven't done anything to effect the Android watch experience.
> They create a market
They didn't create a market in this case. They created a product, which is the Apple Watch.
> Apple actually acts as a gatekeeper to the smart watch market when used with their devices
Wrong- they act as a gatekeeper to developers, not to users. If the new Pebble's core product was their app, then all of this would indeed be anticompetitive behavior (see recent European court cases against Apple). But Pebble's product is their watch, and there is nothing saying that Pebble has the right to integrate into another company's product. Apple could choose to do this, but they don't, and that's okay. Consumers can consider these facts when they are buying a phone.
I think this is the biggest disagreement point between you and the other poster. Whether it constitutes a new market is up for debate, but one can definitely argue that hardware and software that interfaces with iOS devices can be considered a market in and of itself, considering that there are literal billions of iOS devices worldwide.
It would be one thing if iOS was a limited-scope, standalone product. But it's not - a large portion of its value comes from working in conjunction with other, non-Apple software (and to a certain extent, hardware).
Now, in this segment, it's undeniable that Apple has constructed a web of their own solutions over iOS, and consistently gives themselves preferential treatment to ensure that other products have limited, if any, functionality.
This is certainly legal right now, at least in the US. But I don't think it's right or that it serves the consumers' interests. It's very similar to manufacturers of all sorts of physical devices freaking out about third-party repairs, parts, modifications and so on. It even has all the same marketing points about how anything without the explicit megacorp blessing is automatically tainted and unsafe, regardless of what it is.
>> No, the case they are making is that Apple is making things worse for Apple users. They haven't done anything to effect the Android watch experience.
What? Pebble is making the case that Apple is making things worse for Pebble users on iOS devices than for Apple users on iOS devices. That's the case. Android Wear is in the same boat as Pebble here.
> They create a market
>> They didn't create a market in this case. They created a product, which is the Apple Watch.
They created a product to sell in the market they already created, because an iOS user is free to buy any competing watch he wants, but Apple sets the rules for those competitors while setting other rules for itself.
> Apple actually acts as a gatekeeper to the smart watch market when used with their devices
>> Wrong- they act as a gatekeeper to developers, not to users.
What's wrong? What users? Thanks for confirming what I wrote. You agree that Apple acts as a gatekeeper to developers, which means that they control access to the market these developers are trying to reach.
> If the new Pebble's core product was their app, then all of this would indeed be anticompetitive behavior
For a Smart watch, Apple requires that the core product of competitors must involve an App, and Apple is the gatekeeper for that App and thus also the gatekeeper of the competing watch-product.
Their own product requires no dedicated App and can offer features of iOS not accessible to competitors
I’ve been barking up this tree for nearly a decade.
I did for some time too. Look into it again :)
If Apple makes a watch that can receive and send iMessages then there is no reason any other device shouldn't be able to use the same APIs that Apple uses.
It absolutely creates a system where competitors literally cannot compete with the same features.
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
> 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 increases prices and reduces innovation. DOJ seems to agree.
instead then the quality of discussion here will match.
Apple Watch for style, sure. It's a watch after all. Not that it actually looks good.
Plenty of people play games on Macs. It may not be the purpose they bought it does they bought it for general use and that’s part of the general use for many.
For general uses they aren’t better. They cost more. You’re unable to upgrade them. They have less ports and require dongles. The list goes on.
I’ve not had any issues with Linux Bluetooth drivers is so long I can’t even remember when.
You may buy macs now because you’re used to them and you think they’re better. But really you got into macs because of the brand. Because there are very few areas where it is truly better than the others.
- Multiple replies
- Edits
- Scheduled send
- Voice message
- Tapbacks
- Message history
- Message order is reliant on notification order
- Delays in the notification system could be different than the messaging system
- Opaque nature of message going from notification system -> messaging system, difficult if message is lost/not sent with no indication of why
I'm sure. The customers they do not have are like Pebble users, and they don't want customers like Pebble users. They want customers like Apple Watch users.
It is a bit 'masque of the red death' to defend anti-competitive practices, is all I'm saying.
Most of which don’t allow users to waive rights based on a prompt.
So Apple would still have liability anyways for grandma getting scammed, regardless of how expertly worded the prompts are.
Which entails extra customer service costs, handling lawsuits, etc… that someone has to pay for.
I showed that iMessage is trivial to automate and since you both claim that the amount of spam on the platform is very low, we can conclude that ease of automation isn't an important factor when it comes to iMessage spam.
Unless someone decides to move the goalposts we should therefore be in full agreement that Pebble being allowed to integrate with iMessage wouldn't have any appreciable effect on the amount of spam in the network.
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 only be turned on for everyone and that will create a security issue that WILL have a substantial impact on the ecosystem. I didn't say, but believe it to be true that the alternative -- a vendor security assessment program covering software, hardware, architecture and cloud security is not worth Apple's time or money to do. I don't think they have any business reason to do so.
Relying on clients to stop spam would break just about every security design principle so that could never be the primary spam filtering mechanism. Indeed, if you search Github, you'll find evidence of this [3].
Allowing a third party gadget to talk to an iPhone to send messages isn't going to open the floodgates to spam any more than they already are, for what I think are pretty obvious reasons. Anyone who could exploit those integrations can already exploit current APIs with exactly the same limitations.
> In contrast you need to hook into Apple APIs / scripting / sqlite databases on trusted apple hardware in order to automate iMessage.
And that wouldn't change, you would still need to pair a real iPhone to your fake "spammer edition" Pebble, and then your Apple ID and iPhone would quickly get banned. Presumably just like it does now if you abuse [1][2], otherwise that's just bad design.
It's frankly ridiculous that this is even being suggested on a "hacker" forum with nothing but wishy-washy qualifiers about how easy or "hard" it would be.
[2] https://documenter.getpostman.com/view/765844/UV5RnfwM#0d8e0...
Apple is demonstrating here that they can control every aspect of what you can do with your phone, including not allowing Pebble to work.
Apple doesn't even allow you to replace broken parts in your phone unless it has an Apple approved signature that can be validated.
Go look at the CVE's for iMessage, plurality of RCE's on apple devices in the last decade is Apple's iMessage implementation, and it's their own protocol! And almost all of the rest are apple's implementation of the open web standards!
Even with that (large) Apple security group, iMessage is difficult to lock down properly, as you note. However, I think that the cost of 0 day subscriptions for iOS vs Android tell a pretty good story: iOS zero day subscriptions sold to intelligence agencies/governments cost roughly $1mm / seat (phone compromised). Android -- $10k.
There are many many decisions along the way that end up with that raw 100x additional cost for iOS security breaches -- value Apple delivers to its customers when they purchase iOS products.
You cannot pick and choose from the outside and know which of your preferred opening-up implementations would impact that cost. My argument is that opening this up is one of likely hundreds of possible decisions that would contribute to lowering that cost of exploit.
SMS/MMS Full Chain Zero Click: from 7 to 9 M USD
Android Zero Click Full Chain: 5 M USD
iOS Zero Click Full Chain: from 5 to 7 M USD
iOS (RCE + SBX): 3,5 M USD
Chrome (RCE + LPE): from 2 to 3 M USDD
Safari (RCE + LPE): from 2,5 to 3,5 M USD
Whether or not a third party is capable of making a better "ecosystem" of interconnected devices is a separate concern; I'm talking about accessories here, which is the topic at hand.
Kind of amazing you're so confident I don't use the Android ecosystem for a whole bunch of stuff. You know a lot of people use one ecosystem for personal stuff, and another for work? Also that people do stuff like... read reviews? Compare features? Compare specs?
- Coca Cola
- DoorDash
- Adobe
- Tesla
- Canon digital cameras
Ford and Dodge have ranges of similar size engines with similar flow rates in their cars and trucks (treat Ram as if it were Dodge). They both specify the use of filters that follow industry standards like SAE/USCAR-36 and ISO 4548-12. The ONLY reason that you can't swap Ford/Dodge filters between engines with similar filtration requirements is because each company uses a different thread size and filter interface dimensions. Any company could adopt a common standard and simplify the choices at the auto parts store but none of them do, because they all want to exercise some amount of control. The funny part is, they all participate in creating industry standards and they make very little money off the sale of filters. They also make their specifications available to aftermarket filter manufacturers like Wix and Fram. There is no patent protection on a particular thread size or the diameter of a rubber gasket. There is NOTHING stopping Ford and Dodge from unifying the filtration interfaces in their similar sized V-8 truck engines. Why is this part brand specific? You can buy a range of tires that work with either brand as long as you get the right size and durability ratings. You can buy batteries that work with either brand. You can find a whole slew of parts that are standard and interchangeable across brands, but some parts aren't.
This is equivalent to saying, "these two watches both have Bluetooth, a microprocessor, and touch screen, the only reason one watch works with Apple and the other works with Google is because of the software." Apple could open up their software to allow both watches to work with iPhone. But they don't do it. Apple does allow Bluetooth headphones to work fine with iPhones even though they offer the Apple AirPods. So even in the phone market you have analogs to "certain parts can work interchangeably across brands, but these don't." In the automotive world nobody is complaining about anti-trust, so maybe we need to think about whether Apple's actions regarding their watches is actually anti-trust.
On android, you can turn off forwarding notifications to the watch on a per-app basis, so for example I can have youtube put notifications into the android notification center, but not the watch.
On iOS, you can't configure which apps forward notifications to a garmin watch. You only get all or nothing. Apple watch can do this just fine.
Is that not an issue for you? Do you not feel hobbled by that?
Personally if I don't want it on my watch I also don't want it on my phone, so I simply disable all notifications at the app level.
That said, I seem to remember the trick on iOS is to remove one of the notification alert types (can't recall if it's "lock screen" or "notification centre" or "banner") and then it shows up on the phone but not the watch.
People that know what they're doing can go nuts and sideload apks all day long, which is still more flexibility than you'll ever get with Apple.
People that barely know how to use their phone outside of a few key apps will never have to worry about this attack vector.
Which is maybe dumb, but it isn't a problem, because of this:
> They also make their specifications available to aftermarket filter manufacturers like Wix and Fram.
Which is the thing Apple isn't doing, and furthermore is doing the opposite and preventing full compatibility with third party watches even if they would reverse engineer the protocol used between the Apple Watch and iPhones. Which is what makes it an antitrust problem in that case but not the other.
Moreover, the argument you're making is that the automakers purposely cause their filters to be incompatible to limit competition. You're essentially arguing that it should be an antitrust violation in that case. Which is a weaker claim because competition in that space isn't being as clearly inhibited -- nobody is claiming that the incompatibility is impacting the quality of third party oil filters -- but if you made the case that it was then you would be condemning Ford rather than vindicating Apple.
What law in any country requires this? Apple is not a public utility and people don't have rights to access.
> the argument you're making is that the automakers purposely cause their filters to be incompatible to limit competition
No I'm not making that argument. I am arguing that incompatibility is there, could be resolved if the companies chose to. The incompatibility persists and is not illegal. It has nothing to do with anticompetitive behavior. Apple being incompatible with third party watches should be the same- the incompatibility could be changed, but it is not illegal. Just because some people wish things were different doesn't make it illegal or immoral.
Personally, I think that it's really just a convenient third party lockout excuse, but the argument isn't quite as bad as it may seem at first glance.
Has this happened on iOS via WhatsApp?
I know Apple's had a view problems with this happening with iMessage, but always been unsure whether third party app sandbox does a good job of containing this?
Giving all your data to Google (an adtech company) is not an acceptable solution. Not to mention that it's incredibly difficult to leave the Apple ecosystem, by design.
So what is the solution here for the common non-tech savvy smartphone user?
So honestly I think that legislation such as what's happening in the EU is the only solution. This includes investigating Google as well as Apple. I'm not a huge fan of legislation in general but the current state of mobile computing is depressingly bad right now.
> 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.
Btw I agree here. Perhaps the EU is being a little too overbearing in some aspects, but most of it is good. I think in this case Pebble is trying to take advantage of the existing interoperability provisions, which are a general framework allowing devs to request access to certain functions. However the EU has said that they want to target smartwatches in particular which sounds like misplaced priority to me...
What I originally meant was that I don’t see Apple’s reluctance to open up the iMessage ecosystem as an indication that they wouldn’t support a banking or government authentication system. I just don't understand the concern here.
https://www.theverge.com/news/632108/apple-ios-passwords-app...
>The lack of encryption meant an attacker on the same Wi-Fi network as you, like at an airport or coffee shop, could redirect your browser to a look-a-like phishing site to steal your login credentials.
It seems like they're refusing unconditionally and claiming security instead of actually requiring security.
I also worked on Android Wear's iOS app for working with iPhones.
The major problem I see now with these excuses, that I'd like to claim wasn't an issue when I was making them circa 2015-2017, is they're cargo cult (a la Apple likes making things that just work) or boogeymen (if they did anything different, a bluetooth connection would be used, unencrypted, sending all your data into the ether).
The watch has been out for 10 years.
Software is software. Where there's a will, there's a way.
It's very, very, very, hard to believe there's 0 way for Apple to ensure an encrypted connection.
Put another way, avoiding the global observations: If it's impossible, why allow watches to be paired at all?
If it turns out that even then, 10-20 years from now the market is still making mostly glass/metal rectangles with the same feature set of today, then we can consider consolidating that productive capacity for the sake of efficiency.
NSO leaked pricing has not historically differentiated Android or iPhone. I’m not sure where I heard those numbers, but thanks for the correction.
Tiny tiny nit - paying the same for an exploit doesn’t mean you’ll charge the same, but in this case it looks like the value and price structures are what you describe. Sorry!
Slightly less small nit - securing hardware, os and cloud inside some security perimeter model is a lot harder than securing, say, the bitcoin client. So point taken - and, it’s hard at scale, not easy.
Any sane antitrust laws require this. Not that they have to provide compatibility, but they cannot inhibit compatibility. But that's what they do.
> Apple is not a public utility and people don't have rights to access.
Your iPhone doesn't belong to Apple and Apple trying to retain ownership control over it after they've sold it is the evil to be prevented.
> I am arguing that incompatibility is there, could be resolved if the companies chose to.
There are two different kinds of incompatibility.
One is, each model of car has its own type of oil filter, which is an inconvenience but then the third party suppliers just produce all the different kinds, and filters with different specs legitimately should have different interfaces and then you're going to have 100 different filter interfaces regardless and it doesn't matter much if you then need 100 SKUs or 250.
The other is, they purposely thwart compatibility by actively inhibiting third party interoperability, even when the third party is willing to support the vendor-specific interface. There is every reason to prohibit the vendor from doing this because there is no legitimate reason to do it, but a strong illegitimate motive for them to do it in order to inhibit competition.
A strong heuristic for telling the difference between these things is, what percent of the ancillary market is controlled by the seller in the primary market? Third parties being excluded in practice strongly implies malfeasance.
Agreed.
So "just replace x with y" does not really work in this context, MDM is vastly more effort than you think and OP-s point still stands.
If they go to a different store, and buy a non-Apple product, that's insecure. What they need to do is return it and go to the Apple store and buy an Apple product. That's secure. Give the money to Apple.
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.
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 other brand of milk in it, citing "security issues") -- or worse, you can't get your Amazon fridge in your Apple house because it cites nebulous reasons and refuses to open the door - get out of the reality distortion field and accept that it is in people's interests for one item to work correctly with another, and to call venal vendors on their "oh but it wouldn't work or it wouldn't be secure" bullshit.
Really, how is Apple protecting you from clicking Allow on a webbrowser if it asks permissions for WebCam and Microphone? I am asking since I do not have a Mac and really want to know how well are Apple users protected compared to Linxu users from web and microphone on browsers.
Currently we seem stuck in a positive feedback loop where tech becomes more and more paternalistic which creates more and more tech illiterate users which is used to justify even more tech paternalism.
It is convenient that this tech paternalism also happens to align with the profit incentive: Easy to trap people in closed ecosystems this way.
You can put a button in your app that says "Tapping this will drain your bank account and give you cancer" but if it also enables functionality that the user wants, they will tap it.
Most users are not able to root their device due to the number of steps needed and will give up on an app that needs root access. Make it so that you have to do something other than just clicking a warning message to enable using your Pebble then.
Warning messages can be made idiot proof with some thought.
An app decoding complex untrusted media files from the internet? It should have the absolute minimum permissions.
https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
Presumably the DoJ wouldn't have sued Apple for being a monopoly if it was impossible for them to legally qualify as one?
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/gallery/justice-departm...
There is no need to have a "clear" monopoly like Windows in 1990's to abuse your power and presence in the market.
Microsoft tried to build their own extensions to the internet standards, like activex and proprietary DOM/JScript extensions, explicitly designed to lock devs into IE’s ecosystem. It's quite impressive that they managed to miss this opportunity to Adobe. And how Adobe then just... squandered it. I would expect that "being the necessary proprietary piece in significant chunk of internet" would have some deep strategic advantage, but both tech giants couldn't be bothered to do a good job.
For instance, try to play a video game on MacOS. While Vulkan is available on every playform, it's not available on MacOS or iOS despite the fact that it would take an engineer at Apple a weekend to implement (figuritively speaking). Apple are also killing off OpenGL support for MacOS.
Generally, Apple deliberately build a "dependence ecosystem" for their consumers on the product side while also actively preventing engineers from using portable technologies on their platforms.
The fact that MacOS is as open as it currently is is a miracle and I am sure executives hate that.
They create the fastest and most ergonomic mobile hardware on Earth but, outside of web browsing, video editing and some engineering workloads, there's very little you can actually do on it.
Re executives being mad: The thing is, they make money off Mac hardware, and even then its profits are dwarfed by iPhone and iPhone accessories. Which are of course locked down.
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 customers want. But we generally prioritize individual freedom, that private businesses ought to have free choice in what they work with or don't. That's important.
That only becomes a problem when consumers aren't able to switch to a competitor. I.e. when there is a monopoly provider. I.e. which controls 70-90%+ of the market.
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
https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https://www.wsj.com...
The only tariff change ever made on the appstore was as a reaction to an antitrust lawsuit and copied straight to Google. Just that is enough of a proof.
It's a decades old word that used to mean trying to one up someone with tough talk, exaggerating, topping someone. That talk would be so high above the others, it would be the cap on top.
Now to have a good story, to have that cap, people could be... flexible with the truth, so eventually, over the years, to cap started to mean that you were telling a tall tale, a lie.
So a bit of speculation, but it’s possible that the word cap has inverted twice over the years, from a toy/fake bullet, to a real bullet, and now back to being a synonym for fake, which it originally was.
cap in the true/lie sense also has roots there, but more in a superlative sense and not guns
(n.) A falsehood, exaggeration, or lie. "Saying you climbed a V10 after a month? That’s cap."
(v.) To lie, exaggerate, or be deceitful. "He said he coded the whole app in a day, but we know he capping."
A set of four castors. Like the bottom of a shopping trolley. Yours for $699
Tell your friends! "Each castor costs one hundred and seventy five dollars. It costs four hundred thousand dollars to run this computer... for twelve seconds. Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha!" (https://youtu.be/jHgZh4GV9G0?t=19)
I suppose I could see a system where every camera/screen recording access by QuickTime Player forces a popup, because you can't say whether it happened intentionally or due to opening a malicious video file, but that would have to be opt-in for sure.
The argument is that they don't do it to maintain a secure experience but to stop competitors having feature parity with their products.
Personally, I find it annoying that my Garmin watch cannot reply to text messages on my iPhone.
I also find it annoying that my iPhone nags me to cut access to my watch to stop it getting weather updates. It doesn't even nag me the once but repeatedly.
It would be one thing if Apple even competed on features with Garmin but they don't.
I actually switched to an iPhone some time ago and was expecting it to be like you said. But I was shocked that iOS is actually less coherent and a mess in some places, and the App store could be curated better. To be honest the reason I still use it is because the hardware is really good and because it is pretty.
The reason Google loves RCS is because they spectacularly failed 4 or 5 times at introducing their own iMessage competitors.
Competing companies often act in their best interests. And both Google and Apple offer OS’s which have very different value systems. I think that’s good for consumers. If I want open (and all the pros and cons that come with that) I can buy an Android phone. If I want closed (and the pros and cons that come with that) I can buy Apple. If they Apple starts to open up a bit and Google locks things down a bit we get the worst of both worlds and no true options.
this is definitely an apple culture thing though. it's such a clear product choice to get apple users to pressure their friends into buying apple products.
Plus iMessage doesn't allow you to send RCS messages from your laptop, whereas it's easy to do that with Google messages. That makes people with iPhones think RCS is worse than it really is. It's just iMessage that's intentionally hobbled. Not to mention the hostile UI decisions made by Apple, which seems to be the main knock against anything non-blue.
> Apple doesn't even allow you to replace broken parts in your phone unless it has an Apple approved signature that can be validated.
That's fine, I don't want to buy a used iPhone and find out it has random parts in it.
This example completely misrepresents the issue. Nobody is asking Apple to add support for Pebble watches to their devices. They're asking Apple to stop preventing Pebble (and other smart watch manufacturers) from being able to support Apple devices.
It's a whole another system outside of Apple's control and some mutually agreed upon Bluetooth LE elliptic key does nothing to protect it in its entirety. It still leaves cryptographic mistakes, side-channels and all other vulnerabilities.
Like, what does https:// or transport encryption in general really say about the website's security to you? Not much besides transport, does it?
Now we want to expose more than notification contents over Bluetooth (LE)? Are we sure? It has to be carefully designed.
Really Apple allows HTTPS connections but the same implementation concerns apply there. The web server could publish it's private and session keys to a "status" page and leak enough to make decryption trivial
I think it'd be more honest if they say "we don't want to give users options" (for better or worse) instead of claiming it's security
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.
We're discussing whether authorizing third party smart watches to send messages via your iPhone would make it easy for spammers to send iMessage spam. Not just easy, but easier than it is right now using Bluebubbles' approach. Both require physical hardware, an Apple ID, and both are subject to the same server-side spam protection.
That's a very specific claim which you made and you haven't provided any supporting evidence for it, nor a coherent explanation.
> 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
I think if you dig deeper into this train of thought you'll get to the point that I'm making. Having relatively restricted API access to send a handful of iMessages from a 3rd party watch via your own physical iPhone will not enable mass-spam like you claimed it would.
Scaling an iMessage spam operation would be hard not because the client side is completely locked down (which it can never be, see the concept of "analog hole" [1]), but because server-side rate limits and user spam reports are the primary mechanism that keeps spam under control.
[1] This could be an ESP32 pretending to be a keyboard/mouse device that automatically navigates through iMessage UI on an iPhone to send messages just like a user would.
You’re saying there a logical gap between opening up a radio based endpoint on an iPhone and allowing more spam in the system, or at least there’s no reason to think that it would be a different order of magnitude than blue bubbles.
I want badly to agree with you, at least enough to stop bike shedding about it. So let me try: Some possible implementations of opening up sms probably don’t add easier volume and programmatic sms options for developers. If you’re happy with that then we’re in agreement.
I think the main ‘easiest path’ implementation would increase spam though - turning on an iOS app’s ability to directly programmatically interact with messages on device and send and receive them over a radio would allow for simpler automates message parsing, creation and distribution; Apple is clearly not interested in this being a feature available to App Store developers. And Apple would then be in the position of having to do some sort of bound to fail static analysis to prove the messages aren’t being sent out to an IP endpoint at some point, or including requests from some endpoint. And this is both because of the extension of the hardware security circle and because of the necessary feature of having a human out of the loop in iMessage actions.
I propose that this would increase spam on iMessage in that case. It would allow an app maker to use sms without human in the loop, essentially, extending notification to sms without humans opting in.
Either way I think that’s probably what I need as imagining, admittedly a bit vaguely in my initial reference. Appreciate the back and forth.
Apple can't (trivially) detect if there's a fatal flaw in the way the other side derives their secrets for example. They can't know if the device doesn't have a backdoor characteristic/API that gives access to the key material. They can't know if that proprietary stack can't be exploited in n+1 ways because it has been written by an underpaid intern.
But if Apple gave access to everything over BLE they would be expected to. At least by most Apple users. Be it a good or a bad thing. It's a rather enormous access vector, if they'd provide feature parity(-ish) with Watch.
Much more sensible would be to make such features available to apps (and by proxy, wearables) with entitlements. But even then it can be just as insecure, just by proxy.
If it rejects messages with improper encryption, the watch won't get programmed to send them.
In a competitive market, there are a hundred phone OEMs providing every combination of those things for various prices with various trade offs etc.
In a duopoly, there is one company providing A, another providing B and C, and nobody providing D or E. If you chose the company providing B and C, but you still want A, D and E, what are you supposed to do? Reward the company providing even less of what you want?
What you need is more competition.
But yeah...not a popular opinion here, I know...
Really, I'm in the telco industry for 18 years now. The smartphone market is in a way too unhealthy state, especially to properly compete with Apple.
As of today, there is no player in that space who has even remotely the amount of secured income to come up with a similarly specced and volume-scaled device as Apple, and there is little incentive for anyone new to enter this space.
A new entrant would be unable to secure the investment, because even if he would produce the exact same piece of hardware with the same quality, the carrier distribution channels, the brand-image and (walled garden) ecosystem of Apple will prevent users to even notice and adopt the product, and the press would jump onto it and rip it to pieces for not being universally better.
How would this normally work?
--> You disrupt the market by doing something particularly good, while being average in other areas, succeed, then iterate.
But this doesn't work in the Smartphone space as:
1.) iOS users are unlikely to leave their ecosystem because they can't take _anything_ with them
2.) the Google ecosystem leaves little room to disrupt and secure return-of-investment, and
3.) for Android (without Google) you need to (re)build your own ecosystem to _match_ Google/Apple from the start.
That's why it's not a competitive market anymore, it needs external forces to restore an even competition field for Hardware, Applications and Services.
For the benefit of the consumer.
You need rules that restore actual competition. Accept no substitute.
Assuming it isn't regulation (e.g. patents) getting in the way, you pull up your pants and produce [A, D, and E].
If that's too rich for your blood, I suppose rewarding the company that got you something close enough at a tiny fraction of the cost is reasonable. It is hard to deny the value in that.
> What you need is more competition.
Okay, but if you aren't willing to build [A, D, and E], why would anyone else? These things aren't delivered by angels from heaven.
In theory it should be possible for someone to do this. Phones are made of modular parts. Some companies make chips, some make screens, some make operating systems, some make app stores, so you go acquire each of the parts, make your modifications and start selling your phone.
First problem, the best phone chips are made by Apple and they won't sell them to you for use in a competing phone. Also, they won't sell you their OS or let you use their app store. So it's already not possible to satisfy some of the requirements, e.g. using a chip of that quality or compatibility with existing third party iOS apps.
This is hypothetically more possible with Android, but it still isn't. Qualcomm will sell you a chip; it isn't as good, so you can't satisfy "use the best chip", but they'll sell it to you. You can get Android for free. Well, AOSP anyway. But that won't pass Google's Play Integrity system, so you've already lost compatibility with the existing bank apps. Other Android apps have more dependencies on Google APIs that aren't part of AOSP, so you've once again lost widespread compatibility with the only other market for third party apps, unless you ship with Google Play services. At which point you're not satisfying the "doesn't hoover up your data and send it to Google" requirement.
So anti-competitive behavior on the part of the incumbent duopolists is why there isn't more competition, and antitrust enforcement would address it. For example, break up Apple into its constituent parts. Then Apple Silicon is a separate company like AMD or Qualcomm and you could buy their chips to use in your own phones, the existing App Store becomes a separate entity with no monopoly on distributing apps to iOS users, etc.
At which point someone can feasibly produce a phone that does everything you want, and then someone would.
When a market is stuck in a local maximum, an external force would be beneficial to push it out of it.
[1] Which it is in the case of computing. Intellectual property law makes direct competition against the law.
[2] Assuming a democracy.
Microsoft - a multi-trillion dollar company, number 2 in the world by market cap, second to AAPL and several positions above Google - tried really hard for several years to wedge their way into the mobile phone OS game with Windows Phone, adding a third entrant to the market. They had name recognition, an easy win for integration with user PCs, several compelling features, partnerships with huge, vertically integrated hardware manufacturers, and an enormous base of IP for programming. But, in the end, they failed.
Just because people have a desire for a thing to exist does not make that thing exist.
I'd love it if there were another company - call it Pear or something - that was just like Apple but allowed my Garmin watch to reply to encrypted messages, integrated smoothly with my Windows and Linux PCs, allowed sideloading apps, alternative browsers, adblock, and which gave me a whole lot more customization options. I've got the will. Now where's my phone?
How does this work in the context of this discussion?
But who should drive such regulation then, elected representatives which represent constituents who can't be bothered to push for it..?
THAT'S the conundrum.
The market urgently requires regulation, but it also became so convenient so fast and affects end-users only indirectly, so there is no sufficient momentum to drive this change...
After the 30-day period, the enrolment profile cannot be removed on the device-side. This workflow applies for both iOS and macOS.
- requires immense development effort and expansion of security surface area
- STILL offloads trust to Samsung, Google, etc
The hyperbole here is a little hysterical. Apple doesn’t totally lock out third parties. In the smartwatch example, it is a very specific set of features which involved passing data (which users expect to be e2e encrypted!) back to Apple. That’s an extremely hostile security environment! Product tradeoffs would absolutely have to be made in order to support arbitrary third parties! I don’t think it’s fair to just demand that Apple make their product worse without at least exploring the balance.
Anywhere Apple wouldn't trust a third party is a place it should not trust itself either.
It doesn't even have to be arbitrary third parties, it can be Apple's chosen third parties. But they'll choose nobody, because they love lock-in too much, and they'll tell the rubes that it can't be done or it's too hard. That's just bullshit, and they know it. They do it to lock out competitors, so they alone can juice their existing users.
The only thing that can open up Apple is regulation -- and as we've seen in with Apple's spiteful attempts at compliance with EU DMA rulings, it makes up arbitrary criteria calculated to maximally lock out and frustrate business rivals. It's like it's trying to come up with a compliance solution that the EU might accept but would result in as few competitors as possible able to actually use it, ideally zero.
This quite literally could not be further from the truth, and to suggest that it is true reflects such a comprehensive misunderstanding of both the fundamental nature of computer security and the practical realities of the world in which we live that it's not really possible to continue the conversation productively
I don't trust any of those companies the way I trust Apple.
Well, how would they do that with regulation? Have the government (i.e. the people) tell Apple remove restrictions/add features else they can no longer sell the iPhone/operate a business at all, praying that they comply – and if they don't you no longer can buy an iPhone? –– Which is exactly the same as the people (i.e. government) telling Apple to remove restrictions/add features else they will no longer buy iPhones/Apple products, praying that they comply – and if they don't you no longer can buy an iPhone. That can be done right now without regulation, if the will is there.
But the will isn't there. Nobody outside of tech communities ever thinks about this, and the comparatively small number of tech enthusiasts who do, do not form a democracy. If they people don't have the will, they won't do anything.
The idea is that if the will of the people is there, they can threaten companies like Apple (or whatever business) to shape up to their expectations or see sales come to an end. Which is also all the government is going to do. After all, (democratic) government and the people are the exact same thing. There is no magic. But if the will isn't there...
> tried really hard for several years to wedge their way into the mobile phone OS game with Windows Phone
They never tried building an iPhone clone, which should have had no trouble finding a market fit. They couldn't do that because regulation doesn't allow it, but without that regulation there is no go reason why they wouldn't have been able to become a viable competitor.
Microsoft's attempt at a phone, and even Android devices for that matter, only compete with the iPhone in the same way Soylent Green competes with hamburgers. It kind of ticks the same boxes if you look at it through a narrow enough lens, but that is not true competition.
(happy to detail more, like everyone, I love talking about myself :P but figured I'd start with the TL;DR, i.e. the App Store + subsequent boom happened at such a time that made it seems reasonable, years later, to dropout, and having 0 responsibility outside restaurant shifts gave me a fulcrum)
Well, I wouldn't say that the standards for (software) security were anywhere near as high as they are now. It makes sense that our requirements for things change.
> It's very, very, very, hard to believe there's 0 way for Apple to ensure an encrypted connection.
Sure there are ways, but without regulation I struggle to see why should/would Apple ever bother. Nor do I think that a forced way would be held to the same standards as the rest.
> Put another way, avoiding the global observations: If it's impossible, why allow watches to be paired at all?
Because they can't do much, if anything at all?
But the Apple Watch can, and a lot of the same arguments apply to it as much as any third party watch.
I ran debian as my daily driver for like half my life; now I’m on mac and never have to worry about my friggin wifi driver.
Have you noticed how bad the Docker experience is on Macs though, after how many years?
I think it is unjust to share strong opinions about previous issues that Linux distributions had without recent evidence.
It sounds like a lot of the "I used to use Linux, but nothing worked" crowd are either previous Arch-users (no shit you had to do everything manually) or older folks.
Corporations have pressure points and there are a myriad of ways to contribute to the overall progress that each one wants to see for themselves.
Your desire for Apple to become an open system removes my choice to opt into a closed ecosystem, when you already have an open ecosystem to play in.
Yeah, I mean Linux is an abject failure, nothing ever works or runs on it. Nobody needs open data formats or open protocols for interoperability. Binary blobs for the win! /s
>Your desire for Apple to become an open system removes my choice to opt into a closed ecosystem, when you already have an open ecosystem to play in.
Don't worry, it's easy to lock down any open system and we can give you that should you desire it.
>, I mean Linux is an abject failure, nothing ever works or runs on it. Nobody needs open data formats or open protocols for interoperability. Binary blobs for the win! /s
I didn’t say anything of the sort. I said I actively choose a “more closed” ecosystem. Linux has similar problems IMO - “I want to buy a GPU” shouldn’t come with trying to figure out whether the device drivers will actually work, to me. If you want that, you have that choice.
> Don't worry, it's easy to lock down any open system and we can give you that should you desire it.
Only within the constraints of what you want which is that everything should adhere to a standard and be interoperable. Which, again, as I said you can have on android. Go buy a pixel phone, and a samsung watch and see how good the experience is.
I’ll say this again - there are open ecosystem alternatives for you out there, in android. Some people, even technical people, are ok with a smaller ecosystem knowing that there is lock in. If you don’t want that, don’t use it. But if you push your choices on me, you restrict my options and remove my preferred platform to have one more platform you want
> You need rules that restore actual competition
What is the difference between the two?
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...
Apple isn’t using that rule to take down alternate weather apps, despite them having their own native weather app. There’s still plenty of QR code scanning apps, despite that being built into default camera app.
"Apps that copy basic iPhone or iPad functionality (including but not limited to its UI, gestures, core features) will be rejected unless the app provides a clearly different purpose or adds unique functionality."
Note the "basic" line. And there are plenty of Photos, Notes, Streaming etc apps so not seeing where this is being used to exclude competitors.
I enjoy apple devices but hate the walled garden.
There's a lot of fair criticisms of Apple, but they don't have to be absolutely first at everything or never enter the market.
This is also one of the things that makes a big difference between Windows and macOS when getting a new install/machine set up to basic usability. With the former, before I can get anything done there’s a whole laundry list of things that need to be installed and removed (which admittedly is now easier now that winget comes preinstalled), while that list is much shorter on a Mac. For me personally getting through that phase takes at least 3-4x longer under Windows.
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.
It used to be black text on green: https://mobiforge.com/files/iphone-sms-1.jpg
The white-on-acid-green color combination would not make it through any accessibility review. It's literally impossible for a lot of color-impaired people to see, and objectively unpleasant otherwise.
Apple gets plenty of complaints about it. Just look at the Apple forums. Their literal advice to fix it is "make your friends buy an iPhone".
What form of color blindness doesn't let people differentiate between levels of brightness? I checked a couple color blindness simulators and it appears legible.
Heck, white on light green appears to be used in articles about good design for color blind accessibility without any indication that it there's anything wrong with it.
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/06/improving-color-acc...
It is capital intensive, so that is a hurdle, but capital isn't that hard to come by if you are doing something compelling. It was downright easy in the 2010s.
Regulation is the biggest problem. It is straight up against the law to become a direct competitor in computing. Even with all the necessary resources, just try to build an iPhone clone, but with the addition of Y, and see how long you can go before lawyers start breathing down your neck. If you make the first day, I'll be impressed.
You can try to compete indirectly with something kind of the same but different enough to skirt the laws, but that's rarely what the market wants, making it difficult to justify the effort and capital utilization. You need something truly game changing to consider venturing down that road.
Part of the issue is that it isn't just capital intensive, it's capital intensive across a vertically integrated market. If all you had to do was make a phone chip competitive with Apple's, or reimplement the proprietary Google APIs, or convince other phone OEMs and third party developers to use your competing app store, you might be able to pull it off. But when you have to do all of those things and more? At some point the hill is just a sheer cliff.
> Regulation is the biggest problem. It is straight up illegal to become a direct competitor in the computing space.
Oh, that's definitely a major issue. In theory DMCA 1201 has an interoperability exception, but the exception is narrower than it ought to be and then you would have to be willing to stand up for it in court against a megacorp with unlimited lawyers. There is no sensible argument for not fixing things like that.
You can’t enter the cutting edge phone market easily for the same reason you can’t enter the cutting edge fighter jet market easily. Regulations, sure. Capital, sure. Materials, sure. But holy shit you’ve gotta develop everything from the airframe to the turbines to the cockpit and landing gear simultaneously.
It would be completely insurmountable for one person, but distributing the load is what an economy is for. If all you had to do was make a competitive chip, and all I had to do was reimplement APIs, and all Joe Blow had to do was <X>... soon we'll have all the pieces.
> Oh, that's definitely a major issue.
It might even be the only issue. China could no doubt start dumping iPhone competitors on the US market tomorrow if the regulatory environment allowed it.
There are easily hundreds of cases involving some alleged or actual liability that various groups claim Apple to have in relation to this or that feature/product/service/etc.
I just want to learn about a single such lawsuit, anywhere, that's actually succeeded. I can't find any.
I'm fairly sure "Only high quality apps should be available to users" was said more than once when the Apple AppStore first launched (together with the second or third iPhone I think?). Apple isn't really into the whole "users can choose what's best" thing, which once you understand this, a lot of their choices become understandable (albeit shitty none the less).
It's a tricky situation. Windows Vista tried to improve security and then was criticized for having too many UAC pop-ups, and for breaking legacy drivers.
I don't like Apple's syspolicyd, but it is also an attempt at improving security.
Phones, for better or worse, contain much more private and personal information about users than their computer I would bet on average.
So I understand the urge to make phones more secure by default and to help users avoid foot guns, even if it means restricting their choices.
You are likely not the average user, and I think it's a bit selfish to demand total freedom, that you can manage safely, when for most users they would be worse off.
In a perfect world we wouldn't need this but we certainly don't have one of those.
There's secure by default, and then there's stuff users can't override even with great effort. Android restricts some dangerous operations by default and makes users jump through a couple hoops to acknowledge the risk. iOS usually forbids them entirely.
I do not in fact see that. PCs work pretty damn well, security-wise, even with clueless users. I'll grant you it isn't as secure as phones, but it's by no means horrible.
The upshot of this is that Apple can unfairly compete in all sorts of verticals just by owning that platform. A lot of companies could make a good Airpod competitor, but without access to the same functions as Apple's they're hamstrung. Watches have this problem even worse.
Say what you want about Microsoft at their zenith, you COULD compete with their browser, in fact, people did. You just can't with iOS. That's more important than some users having poor security. (And really, how are we going to worry about phone security when there's a system as stupid as passwordless social security numbers being the key to your financial life?)
The natural duopoly needs to be regulated such that it doesn't spill over into every tangential market.
The ability to build better things is the reason why you can now sit here, using technologies built on that "shit show" machine, and bloviate how new generations aren't allowed to build new things anymore because a megacorp needs to feed its greed.
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.
the average person doesn't even understand the basic concept of what the average HN reader considers system administration, and we're wrong anyway eh
I suspect Apple can significantly cut down on abuse prevention measures just by making it harder to automatically send iMessage spam.
If any random Bluetooth smartwatch was allowed to send those, there's no telling how that capability could be abused, we all know how IoT vendors are with device security.
You do realize that you're implying that Apple is insecure by design? Because I can easily (locally) root my iPhone and get raw access to iMessage.
Couldn't agree more: https://www.cve.org/CVERecord/SearchResults?query=apple+watc...
Not all corporations make better choices, however, which motivates a regulatory role. Thus is civilisation identified.
It is the responsibility of the systems designer to make sure the system is secure, not the end user.
And if you require instructions on how to secure your system, then you have already failed. A properly designed system is secure with zero knowledge.
Remember, it takes work to learn anything, and the goal of a tool is to reduce work, not to increase it.
Throw away customization. Throw away configuration. Both of those are bad design principles.
Make it work by default.
Isn't the choice to use an android, then?
This doesn’t even make sense in relation to my prior comments… as unsuccessful cases also cost Apple, and various other parties, real money. So it seems entirely irrelevant to the point.
To make matters worse, you cannot just develop it, but you have to develop it in an entirely new way that has never been conceived before, else you will be in violation of endless patent and copyright claims.
But the reality is that the development is already done. No need to reinvent the wheel. It was a huge undertaking, but we've already done it. It is now only regulation that locks it up in a monopoly. Capital, materials, even effort are definite hurdles – but regulation is the reason why duplicating it for the sake of a competitive marketplace is impossible.
I actually disagree with you that things are good, security-wise, today.. They are still pretty bad.
Back then was extremely bad.. Back then, Windows was never designed to be a networked operating system and was just full of security problems like you wouldn't believe.
A true competitor will take at least a decade of work IF allowed in the US. I don't think you can escape iPhone Android duopoly in the short term.
You wouldn't need to, if regulations were removed, as you would just straight up copy the iPhone/Android devices. You'd become a true competitor, not be left trying to establish an entirely new parallel market.
But currently, true competition is illegal in this space. Police will be knocking down your doors if you so much as even consider thinking about competing – actually competing – with the iPhone. All you can do is kind create something that is sort of similar, but not really, and that's not going to fly in the marketplace. The market wants iPhones, not something that might passingly look like an iPhone if you squint hard enough, but is entirely different in almost every other way.
In any case we are largely still learning when it comes to security and I don’t really want to make things less secure for the many just to satisfy the few.
We aren’t going to out bid them on any of these things. We have to make it illegal, and vote in people who will enforce the laws.
The OpenAI grift, the Facebook & Google stalking advertising, the Uber “independent contractors”, and the Amazon two-for of workers pissing in bottles and squeezing your suppliers so prices rise everywhere.
Yes, what a loss for the EU.
That's a pretty massive claim. Do you have any examples of this?
And by the time the EU attempted any of those, we already had the duopoly and the competition was already dead.
When Apple did offer Night Shift in iOS 9.3 it made the APIs to do this Apple-only, for ... reasons. As of today, no non-Apple app can modify color temperature of the display.
The actual reason behind F.lux for iOS being pulled - https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/3smf15/the_actual_re...
> Sure, it uses private APIs, but thousands of popular projects on Github (like game simulators) or that Apple TV web browser project all use private APIs and they are just fine.
> The issue is F.lux for iOS is not a true source-available download. It includes a full app bundle with pre-compiled binary (which in a nutshell, is an extracted .IPA file) packed within Xcode to utilize Apple's new free signing policy.
> And to making things worse, the same F.lux Xcode project does not only allow side loading F.lux itself, but also any unsigned IPA file. The only thing a user needs is to extract an unsigned IPA and drag all resources into the project. This allows pirates to install any stolen app, without the need to buy a developer certificate. I have tested and believe this is the true reason for F.lux project being pulled.
Screen tinting like that is exactly the kind of thing that should be an OS-feature, not an app feature.
They are similarly quite restrictive on MacOS, with some system-impacting features being locked behind “accessibility” permissions. So that arbitrary apps can’t interact with other apps unless they are actually doing something that needs it like “being a screen reader”.
iOS doesn’t have the same sort of permissions. Apps can’t take over interactions with other apps, or change display settings, etc. This is a security boundary. And changing that specifically for “changing screen colors” seems unnecessary to me.
It seems that third-party software, even software with accessibility permissions, doesn't work on password screens (and probably in a few other similarly-secure places), and you need those to be accessible. Not to mention weird places like system recovery, which (for very obvious and understandable reasons) does not allow 3rd-party software at all.
I guess you could use a third-party SR for most of your system and then toggle VoiceOver on when accessing the secure parts, but that would get very annoying very quickly.
There's also no 3rd-party access to some speech-related features, like the higher-quality neural Siri voices. You'd also need APIs for things like automatically being informed of incoming system notifications to read them as they come in (which the first-party VoiceOver does), and those don't seem to be available at all.
It was using private APIs.
This is never acceptable as it undermines the entire security architecture.
Private APIs for security reasons? Sure.
For this? Garbage. There is not a single cogent reason that a color temperature API is a security gate. Or if you think there is, what is it?
Even innocuous apps like a calculator can, and do, use them for that purpose.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/16/22676706/apple-watch-swip...
My point is that it is good that they focus on making their own products work well together, it provides better value than being wide open and trying to work super well with everything. Windows tries to work well with any peripheral, and its a bad experience.
I hope to read this blog post in an antitrust case from the DOJ one day.
You can. There are dozens (hundreds?) of phones you can buy that aren’t an iPhone. It’s been well known for nearly 20 years at this point that iPhones are more closed than the competition (of which, again, there is a lot). They are successful because of this, not in spite of it, contrary to internet belief.
However, apple devices have been just more reliable for me and retain better resale.
This is important because Apple could one day decide that caring about you no longer serves its interests. This has already happened with user experience, where even the Settings app now has built-in ads pushing Apple's services. It has also happened with security, where Apple uses its robust security infrastructure to prioritize media company DRM over users' interests.
Android shows that you don't have to.
Truthfully there isn't much you can say to people in that mindset.
The App Store process automatically checks for them and blocks submission.
Curious how apps are bypassing this and not sure why they would be trying to prevent debugging when it's not possible to do this.
Those APIs are only there because they're needed by some higher-level system library that your app is actually allowed to use.
Sure, you could have all libraries be simple shims, all calls be interprocess, and all security be guaranteed by process boundaries, but that would kill performance.
If you only accept signed code and have W^X protections that apps aren't allowed to disable, this way is simpler, faster and just as secure.
When asked about it, he doesn't have too many files. What do you do in that case? Isn't he a moron both for storing so much porn and at the same time (somehow) believing a tech support person wouldn't find the root of the problem. It was in a "hidden" folder, so not only he is a moron for the first offense, but doubly so for thinking a competent person wouldn't find something so obvious.
So, I reiterate, most people are morons, and technology just reveals their ineptitude in plain sight, it's simple as that.
You are free to believe in your idealized version of the world, but it doesn't match my experience at all.
I actually think your example illustrates this: people use their computers for porn. There's nothing wrong with that. If it's so large that he has no space left, I mean that's a pretty actionable thing to tell him. He's not an idiot for not figuring it out himself. That he "hid" the folder from you–I mean, people hide things from professionals all the time. Nobody volunteers to their doctor that they wipe in the wrong direction and thus have chronic UTIs. It's your job to work around the reasonable things people do that make your work harder and bring them to "oh, that makes sense, thanks" perspective.
There's probably something important and complicated in the world you have to interact with regularly that you don't understand very well. Based on this comment, I think it might be people.
Pretending otherwise is nonsensical, since the richest economies in the world depend on it and surely not everyone is at a genius level.
There are some things important and complicated that I don't understand very well but they are not about basic operation of relatively simple things. It's like saying operating a washing machine or using a knife is something special.
And I do understand people very well; in fact, much more than I wish, by necessity. Your average person is frustratingly basic to the point of being extremely annoying on top of boring. I just choose to not pretend and "be nice" anymore, because it just hides reality and doesn't help anyone. The fact that we have some people designing complex computers or sending people to the moon while others are barely able to cook a meal is largely a testament to that.
You might want to get rid of your ideologies if you believe what I said is controversial or wrong. Most people, by statistical definition, are idiots. Technology just reveals that fact very clearly, it's as simple as that.
(But also, this kind of thing is exactly why the analogy doesn't even make sense.)
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)
Closing your mind to the possibility that Apple is throughly rotton is probably soothing, but the possibility remains that we are right, you are wrong, and each time the conclusion is the same, and correct
Big Tech monopolies sniffle innovation and hord resources
Intellectual property laws is not some natural law of the universe. It only exists because the people (i.e. the general public) want it to exist. They could do away with it on a whim, but choose not to. Which isn't irrational as it may first seem. Their own careers probably rely on the status quo, and their retirement savings no doubt rest on companies like Apple being worth a fortune, so there is a lot of incentive to not rock the boat.
We have not tried, and it is not due to "we the people" it is due to "them our overlords"
You are just of bad faith, pretending to be outraged about what I said even though it only describes the reality of the world. Your newfound religion is so bad that you find offensive something that doesn't even have any moral implication to it and is factual proven by so many statistics that it is not even worth arguing about.
If you what you mean is "not every computer user is a moron" you need to work on reading comprehension because that's not what I said. I stand by my original statement and you are somewhat proving me right.
> Apple uses its robust security infrastructure to prioritize media company DRM over users' interests
You mean they follow the law so that they don't get sued into the ground?
I expect corporations to be honest and sincere, and present the full argument for why they're doing what they're doing. I don't know if "people" in general expect this, but if they don't, then their expectations are too low.
I am quite sure there is no US law which says Apple must build out support for media company DRM. Linux doesn't support it and hasn't been declared illegal.
Mate, have I got bad news for you regarding literally the entirety of human commerce.
Funny enough, the state of intellectual property tends to be much more relaxed where overlords are actually found (e.g. China). It's easy when one guy can make things so. Far less easy when you have millions upon millions of people afraid that any change will impact them personally.
Yes, I don't want apps accessing my messages surreptitiously. Points there.
However, what's wrong with allowing another app to post messages to my messages?
If I don't want it, let me turn them off. Maybe, as a UI expert company, it's easy "block app from sending me messages" when I get a message. Seems like something that should be fairly transparent to the (potentially misbehaving) app.
I use a Garmin, and Android, and I use it for messages all the time, it's great. I can't imagine not taking them. It's easy for me to block stuff I don't want, could it be easier, maybe...
But my point is this isn't something unreasonable for a user to want.
As a general aside, it seems when I hear about Apple products anymore, they are locked down, unintuitive, and generally just unpleasant. I even tried an Apple device again recently...eugh.
Apple is only "nice" for a certain, narrow segment of the population.
That's exactly what spammers would use to send spam.
They might just as well beat you up and take your wallet.
> If I don't want it, let me turn them off.
Can you it off for anyone sending you messages too?
That's the issue; you not wanting to use it does not mean that spammers won't use it.
That's the problem. You can't have nice things if some people can use it to abuse the system; and there are a lot of people who will.
> But my point is this isn't something unreasonable for a user to want.
This ignores the reality which is that doing it in a way that gives a nice user experience without an enormously painful security issue is really non trivial.
Maybe it's OK to have the choice?
...
If you love your android phone, don't care about iOS, don't like iphones.... why do you care? I mean, why does it upset android users when they see this sort of thing for people using iphones?
It mystifies me. If you love you phone, and you think it's better, then use it.
Nothing lost right?
EDIT: example script to run from a mac terminal:
osascript -e 'tell application "Messages" to send "$message" to buddy "+12345678" of (1st service whose service type = iMessage)'Because it affects my life, and can be fatal even, thats why.
Apple should be able to lock down their ecosystem as a default -- plenty of people will be happy to use that default experience.
But Apple should absolutely be prohibited from not allowing users the choice of unlocking their own device, for additional functionality, if they choose.
It's also glaringly obvious that many of the "freedoms" Apple affords its users (freedom from iMessage spam!) help drive its revenue...
Yea I mean this isnt really hard to understand. 99.9% of users would rather have no iMessage spam and also not be able to publish messages from their 3rd party watch. This works in Apple's favor revenue wise because people value having clean and familiar experiences, and dont feel like they are leaving anything behind
This example might be apples-and-oranges when it comes to the protecting Apple protecting iMessage, but they often rob the user of the choice that other manufacturers offer.
For example: Hotspot. Android hotspot can be perma-on. iPhone hotspot cannot. It will always switch itself off after some time of non-use. When I asked an Apple employee about this (This was not his dept), his understanding was that it was for not-clogging up Wifi at-scale, and for users who forget to turn it off. But what about the users who want it on always, who pay their cell provider for the biggest pacakge? My computer goes to sleep, and the hotspot turns off and I have to go manually switching it back on because "Apple knows better". I want those choices.
How can you not realize that you're being abused?
It would be one thing to acknowledge Apple's doing something bad here but still decide to use their products because you like their hardware. That would be a cost/benefit trade-off. But actually thanking them for the abuse itself? There's really, legitimately no better way that I can think of to characterize the situation than as Stockholm syndrome.
I do not want 3rd party hardware/software vendors to have unrestricted access to the messaging app on my phone that is the only option my bank and PayPal and a bunch of other critical services use for 2FA.
Especially not when the software they want to run is JavaScript, with all it's well known npm dependancy nightmares, _and_ from a founder and team that openly admit iPhones are a second class citizen in their development planning and resources.
And especially especially not when the founders have previously shown their colors when they rugpulled all their customers and effectively bricked all the devices they'd sold.
Even with the limited iMessage/SMS access they have now, I wonder how long it'll be before we see a supply chain attack against Pebble exploiting some 11th level deep npm dependancy on something dumb like leftpad.js, that exfiltrates SMS 2FA codes and first anybody knows about it will be when a bunch of CryptoBros start complaining about their exchange accounts being emptied...
As a Pebble user for a long time, I'm not exactly sure what you're talking about here. If you're talking about Fitbit halting services, I can't exactly blame the founder of Pebble for that. Can I blame him for the poor business decisions that led to needing to sell to Fitbit? I guess, but I'm not a business person nor a CEO and have no idea what transpired to lead up to that. But I'm reasonably sure it wasn't malice as you seem to imply.
yeah ok
So many people complaining about a really robust connector that solved real problems and has proven to be pretty reliable for 13 years. I'm no huge Apple fanboi, and I'm happy to have all their stuff use USB-C now, but the hate for Lightning is way inflated IMO.
Over the years, third party cheap ones were risky. May damage port or device.
Has a stupid chip in the connector so people can't easily replicate it like a USB cable.
It was the purest example of proprietary capture in an age where the "The correct universal port" has been around for decades. The massive irony is not missed on me as they used USB mouses and keyboards to engineer a step backwards.
There's things I like about Apple, but I could never bring myself to defend the lightning cable.
Thanks Apple, for switching connectors on your mobile devices once in 25 years and enforcing standards on 3p peripheral and cable manufacturers, until a government forced you to change making me throw all my cables away.
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: it’s not much of an argument to point out that one of their selling points is an aspect of their ecosystem! I don’t think you’ll get through to anyone who doesn’t already agree with you.
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.
The Apple ios app store is positively chock full of spyware. You can’t download apps without a care in the world. This is why Apple put a privacy label on the apps (which is still woefully inadequate; it is self-reported).
That's rich knowing that most of the money Apple gets from the Appstore is made from predatory casino-like games
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 link. You had to host it yourself, there was no store so you had to advertise your app to make it discoverable. You had to arrange (and pay for) a shortcode and SMS provider for every single country you wanted to sell in. You had to write and host code to handle the incoming message on the shortcode and respond with a RB-SMS.
Next to that, the SDK’s were absolute dogshit, phone manufacturers didn’t give a shit about apps and the phones themselves were riddled with bugs (with the notable exception of SonyEricsson, their J2ME environment was excellent). Symbian was a PITA to develop for, BlackBerry was actively developer-hostile (unless you happened to be a Fortune-500 company). Samsung phones were an absolute disaster, every single phone model had a unique set of bugs you had to find workarounds for.
So in comes Apple, they charge only 30% and for that you get a nice SDK, an App Store that distributes your app, makes it discoverable and handles payments worldwide with zero extra effort. We were thrilled when they announced it, and rightfully so.
Google then followed suit with the Play Store, effectively matching what Apple was doing.
So yeah, Apple deserves some thanks for what they did with the App Store.
Not in the PC world, back when the App Store was released I was paying 4% to my e-commerce provider.
They did move to USB-C, but the lightning connector was actually a great product, far superior in usability to the Micro-USB, Mini-USB, and whatever other nonsense standards that existed. When Apple wanted to move to USB-C people complained about them "changing standards all the time". There really isn't a move that pleases everyone and even when they do the "right" thing people still complain lol.
> App Store too, for all the good it does everyone in the EU
The Apple App Store is pretty great. There's a large, vocal minority of folks that want changes there, but they also aren't the ones that have to deal with grandma and grandpa doing crazy stuff. If you want another App Store just by an Android phone since that's a feature they offer. Kind of like if I wanted a phone with a larger megapixel camera or something I'd buy something else.
Almost every Apple lighting cable in my household frayed...
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/How+to+Repair+a+Frayed+Apple+Li...
>Apple charging cables, such as the Lightning to USB Cable, are easily prone to fraying. Most commonly, this fraying occurs from device usage while charging.
> If you want another App Store just by an Android phone since that's a feature they offer.
Sorry, this is bullshit. Alternative sources for installing software will always exist, even current iPhone users have to accept Cydia as an option. You don't ever have to leave the Apple App Store, but your preference has no right to enforce an artificial limitation onto other users. The Mac as a product would not exist without third-party software distribution, the iPhone is undeniably stifled by Apple's stance on the matter.
I couldn’t care less about Apple’s case, but the fact that this is being touted as the EU’s biggest achievement in decades says a lot about why Europeans don’t like the EU.
Turns out that (fairly applied) antitrust doesn't care how much it money it costs an incumbent company to begin allowing competitors
- Is this stifling competition?
- Is that harming consumers?
Per the contents of the blog post, yes this is absolutely stifling competition given that Pebble won't be able to provide the same features/experience as the Apple watch. This directly hurts Pebble which prevents them from competing.
As for how much that hurts consumers, the answer is not a clear "yes". The iOS market share is ~60% in the US and I don't think the majority of those folks wear or are interested in wearing any kind of watch, smart or not.
However, if Apple keeps this up they're absolutely going to go the way of Ma Bell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._AT%26T_(1982) and the eventual Telecommunication Act of 1996 which forced incumbent providers to interconnect with folks who would ostensibly be their competition.
This is incredibly vaguely defined here. Saying that apple stifles smart watch competition by not actively working to make iphone more interoperable with non apple smart watches is ridiculous. You'd never say that a car company is stiffing competition by making it hard to install a new engine, or mount after market add-ons.
People have such a confusing hate-boner for apple. Just buy an android phone.
Any smart watch vendor should be able to call up Apple and make their own watch which is equally privileged to Apple's. And the requirements to the vendor to do so needs to be not so onerous as to be an effective ban.
If the software you use today, that the businesses you go to, even in the US, are using it, then there's hardly stagnation, is there?
I prefer the gatekeeper, in this case.
> surely any "spyware" on the app store is going to include a ton of permissions alerts when it does anything?
Not really. Push notifications is enough. I can send you a push notification and get loads of details from your phone, including cross-app fingerprinting. Iirc Apple allows ~3 silent push notifications per hour so they can be completely hidden.
https://gizmodo.com/iphone-apps-can-harvest-data-from-notifi...
But really, your search is as good as mine. The entire digital economy is based on personal data collected from your devices, and yes, that includes the iPhone. How is this news? What’s your definition of spyware?
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.
If they are right next to you, there are many criminal activities more lucrative than sending an imessage...
...Which wouldn’t be possible anyway, because devices using ble to communicate typically require to be paired together by their owner.
Also, I'm pretty sure you can just set up a click farm to spam from iPhone right now, so there's also that.
If you 'opt-out' then it does not fix the problem of spammers having easier access to imessage.
I'll say that again: If you personally, either a) opt out, or b) dont have a watch at all, it makes no difference to spammers. They are not sending spam using your watch.
People are concerned about the result of allowing anyone to send messages in general.
...
The real argument to be made here is, as other people have pointed out, this isn't technically impossible; I mean, apple watch can do it right?
So there is a solution; but Apple isn't allowing other people to use it.
THAT is the issue here.
Pretending there is 'no issue' is flat out wrong. If that what you think, you're wrong and you haven't understood the problem.
The issue is why only Apple is, according to Apple, technically capable of implementing the controls required to do it in a secure manner.
That's a fair question to ask, and there really isn't a strong answer for it.
Certainly, making it easy for anyone to send messages would not be a solution. That would be stupid. That's why they haven't done that.
...but, you have to ask, is there really no certification process that would do the job? Really? None? Only Apple engineers are smart enough and diligent enough to do it without screwing it up? Hmmmmmmmmmm...
Imagine a world where they allow Pebble to go through certification process for it to get jailbroken half a year down the road opening the gateway to iMessage for all the spammers in the world. What then? Should Apple now play whac-a-moll with the spammers forever, or block the access to all Pebble watches creating another scandal? And what if this happens to next 10 different watch makers down the road?
They own Apple Watch and if it gets jailbroken its their mess to deal with, but if they open it to the world then they have zero control over it.
If they further block it by default but allow Pebble users to bypass the block with some very scary warning message then My God there wouldn't be a scandal at all. People who know and accept the risks can use the thing they paid money for as they please then.
Apple doesn't get to be a major player in the market without playing fair.
I do think that the state of AppleScript automation is the result of trying to break the mechanisms that were being used to generate SPAM. Could you agree that automation capable interfaces do increase the chances of bad actors taking advantage? Right now, with a lack of information, I don't know how I could make an iMessage automation interface "safe by design".
I do see a direct path from the mandated AT&I breakup and interoperability rules to SIP / VOIP services and the resulting levels of Phone spam and caller-id fraud. This has cost a lot of people, life changing amounts of money and much wasted effort and time.
Un-nuanced tech laws or mandates have a terrible track record for having bad side effects. Those effects often never get addressed, which makes me wonder a bit about the original motivation of why the laws came to be in the first place.
I also see a narrative that company X will automatically refuse to work with company Y or community Z and are de-facto always acting in bad faith. Even if company X was never approached or asked - yeah, companies do tend to isolate themselves making direct communication very, very difficult. I cannot deny that there are some company X's that do seem to behave very poorly. A counter example, in my opinion, is the recent Bambu labs API issue. As a tinkerer, a few minutes of looking at how people had built interactions with their printers strongly suggested to me that Bambu introducing an actual API endpoint was a really, really sane thing for them to do. (I did comment this way). Only time will tell if Bambu was actually trying to improve things or was acting in bad faith.
USB-C development started in 2012 (I was not there!), but from wiki, the ever helpful source of truth: "The design for the USB-C connector was initially developed in 2012 by Intel, HP Inc., Microsoft, and the USB Implementers Forum. The Type-C Specification 1.0 was published by the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) on August 11, 2014.[1] In July 2016, it was adopted by the IEC as "IEC 62680-1-3".[3]"
I not sure of the logic here, but Lightning solved a problem way before USB-C existed and I'm sure, led to support of USB-C standards such as reversible connectors etc...
So... just buy an Android? This is not an artificial limitation, it's an express preference that the vast majority of iOS users have voted for.
> The Mac as a product would not exist without third-party software distribution
The Mac is a completely different product servicing a completely different set of needs. Nobody is asking for the iPhone to be able to run Node or Vim so they can do their work, they want to scroll Instagram and reply to their iMessage
But they're not, so I'm continue to assume they know what they're doing. Again, go buy an Android if that's what you want
For a hardware project I looked briefly at the MFi terms and they just don't make any sense. This is why any good lightning cable was always more expensive (at least before you get some from China with contraband auth chips)
Lightning is a major cash crab from Apple and revealed their actual playbook. Microsoft passed as a very bad players in the 90's but Apple is even worse. The only people not accepting that are deranged fans.
And if you need market cap to understand these areas, both Nestle (France) and Lactalis (Switzerland), outpace the entirety of the US industry.
The average person probably thinks that their phone, or websites, show no innovation, despite the rapidly changing underlying technologies.
[0] https://www.ahfesproject.com/app/uploads/2022/04/AHFES-A6.2_...
Apple was also part of the working group that developed USB-C.
Also relevant: 19 engineers from Apple worked on the USB-C connector and cable specification[1].
«None of the chargers fit snuggly into socket. The connectors are flimsy and get damaged easily. Just rolling up the charger and putting it in my pocket can cause the tip to break off»[0]
«While on the whole, I am satisfied with the switch to USB Micro, my only major gripe is the less obvious keying. Inserting the plug with good lighting is no problem (if you can see), but trying to plug in your cell phone after you've crawled into bed with the lights off can be a trial. As somebody who works with people with disabilities and medical conditions, I have heard from clients with compromised motor control, those with low vision, and those with distal neuropathies that they do experience a harder time plugging in their devices nowadays»[0]
[0] https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/18552/why-wa...
if the worst thing is someone else's code then someone else's hardware
Because they did that.
This cannot be your actual stance.
You know there is a lot more to the Internet than that one website, right?
There are ads in algorithm apps like YouTube, tiktok, Instagram, mobile games, streaming service "poor" subscriptions, etc. And there are paywalls. But the vast majority of interesting websites don't have ads anymore.
Yeah you're an exception.
Thankfully people like you don't get to decide what EU rules as best for people.
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 only ever been a means to charge the phone and to connect it to CarPlay. With wireless CarPlay and MagSafe charging, they could remove the port and I wouldn't miss it all that much (except for fast charging).
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/26/iphone-us...
Apple was already well under way on their USB-C transition. They literally shipped the first all-USB-C laptop in 2015. Not the first Apple laptop. The first laptop full stop. The iPad Pro switched to USB-C from Lightning in 2018. Every year since, fewer and fewer devices released with Lightning and more and more with USB-C.
If you need more evidence, literally just consider that Apple never bothered to invest further in Lightning. There were no further speed bumps. No updates in the USB protocol version supported. Even charging, USB-A to Lightning has been capped at a pitiful 12W. Does this seem like the behavior of a company that wants to stay on Lightning?
The iPhone would undoubtably have been USB-C in a generation or two even without the EU’s involvement.
Some USB-C cables aren't data compliant. They just send power. There's all kinds of foibles with USB-C that have taken years to work on and this just isn't clear to tech folks, let alone non-tech consumers.
The Lightning port has never done this to me, the device just charges and that's it. It transfers files and that's it.
What I'm saying is that Apple didn't have to take a cut from every item sold by 3rd parties who wanted to use their specs. They could even have sold the spec at a fair price but instead they went on a full rent-seeking strategy.
This is why, when there is chatter about Qualcomm/Apple feud on licensing, I laugh my ass off because this is exactly the same behavior they impose on their partners. Can dish it out but can't take it. My complaint is mostly about the hypocrisy of Apple's behavior.
But the real motivator was making as much money as possible, the fact that their specifications had some desirable qualities is nice but not very relevant (since you don't get a choice if you wanted to make an iThing accessory anyway). Their previous port (30-pin) had the same problem and it was rather terrible. I had the first iPod with FW400 and they could have very well gone with mini-USB when they switched to their 30-pin to make it compatible with most PC who mostly had USB 2 and rarely FireWire. I used mini-USB for plenty of things from external hard-drive to digital cameras passing by digital mini-disc players and it was a fine port.
Yet they chose to make their completely proprietary 30-pin port, to rent-seek as much as possible on the accessory market. When they switched to Lightning, the goal was exactly the same, trying to pretend it's because it was better is disingenuous and very ignorant of Apple's history and behavior.
Plenty of corporations do things like that but the difference is that with Apple there is an army of zealots eating the bullcrap and justifying their behavior in a fanatical way.
Except all the profits from selling all those cables, connectors, and converters.
The 3rd party manufacturers didn't make profit because of Apple but because of their customers choosing their products.
The way you try to reverse the situation and try to pretend Apple is entitled to a percentage of revenue from other companies making things to work with their products is pure insanity.
Do you think the brand of your car should get a cut of every compatible thing you buy to use with it? Should they get a cut on brake pad, tires, cables to their entertainment system, carpet of the right size for the particular car, etc. The list can be almost infinite.
Do you realize how absurd what you are trying to defend is?
Tech stack has the customers. You pay for access to customers.
Other options available to Apple instead of Lightning:
* stick with the iPod connector for longer
* switch to micro-USB
* never invent the iPod connector in favor of staying with Firewire or going to mini-USB and then switch to micro-USB or something else later anyway
None of these are better. I'm EXTREMELY glad they didn't switch to micro-USB. I had no shortage of mini-USB and then micro-USB devices and the micro-USB ports/cables are pretty much the worst I've ever dealt with.
If not for the lightning connector, we wouldn't have usb-c as we know it today.
Its also a stretch to claim apple doesn't like usb-c given how hard they've been pushing it on their laptops. In 2016, they started shipping laptops that only had usb-c ports - which worked around the chicken-and-egg problem we would have had otherwise. Dongle-gate was a real thing that annoyed a lot of people. But my desk is covered in usb-c peripherals - and that might not have happened if not for apple's "brave" choice.
Without that, USB might have died.
All in all, Lightning was a net benefit that overstayed its welcome by a few years. Even once USB-C was introduced a few years later, it took a few more years than that to become as pervasive as it did.
As noted in other comments, Apple was part of the USB working group, contributed to USB-C, and introduced USB-C/Thunderbolt-only laptops in 2016. There was backlash against this so they have since backtracked and reintroduced MagSafe and HDMI ports. Personally I would have preferred more USB-C/Thunderbolt ports.
It is not just technically wrong to say “the iPhone doesn’t support a thing” when it the statement only applies to a fraction of the product line and actual user experience.