AirPods libreated from Apple's ecosystem(github.com) |
AirPods libreated from Apple's ecosystem(github.com) |
The first is not hackable and the second promised much and delivered just an initial dump with dubious sdk license
Surely, Apple will close this hole in the next version.
They're a user-hostile company. I stopped bothering with it years ago.
Yes, their hardware might be slightly better than the competition, but the difference is not earth-shattering. Certainly not worth all the trouble and uncertainty of what will happen next year when Apple improves their vendor locking.
My advice: stop feeding the beast, and start owning your hardware!
But... in my country, Apple Airpods are not certified as "hearing aids", so that functionality is blocked... Perhaps with this, I will have an Android phone in my future...
I remember flashing the Pine64 Pine Buds and man I could not get them to sound right aside from the original settings. They were not great to begin with but yeah.
The UI looks great
It’s convenient only as long you stick to their closed ecosystem. Requiring a device to identify as an Apple device to expose all features is an anti-feature. The devices should expose all features regardless, and leave it to the device/platform vendor to implement the config software.
If it’s consciously kneecapping the device for all manufacturers except yours, it’s not a practice beneficial to anyone but monopolies, so consumer laws should prevent it.
This repo seems to prove the case of AirPods is closer to the latter.
You might argue, well why did Apple choose to use Bluetooth at all if they’re not going to participate in the interoperability motive? Because initially (think early iPhones) Apple did not design wireless communication modules and benefits from buying COTS from existing vendors.
So would it be easier to just participate in vendor lock-in? Let me ask you, do you enjoy being able to fill up a car at any gas station, or charge your car at any 120V outlet? Standards usually benefit everyone.
Going to change it to GPL, though. never paid attention to the license in use as I developed.
Will it mean if my kid travels with their phone (Android) and their AirPods and me/my phone (Android), I won't get a message about being tracked anymore?
That would be nice.
No. They want to sell more i-devices so this is just punishment for not fully participating.
I’d also be curious if anyone can offer insight on why the range is so much better when paired with my iPhone than my computer.
Let’s definitely not pretend like Teams isn’t the crappiest app in the Milky Way. Any user issues can be squarely placed on Microsoft teams with confidence. Actual garbage app.
What would Apple even gain out of this? They don’t have a competitor to MS Teams, FaceTime is hardly targeting the same segment.
Just putting out that statement is kind of “ok and now”?
Citation needed
I wish their displays could be liberated though
I haven’t used non apple earphones for awhile but the seamless connectivity performance of AirPods would suggest this was done for performance, not to deliberately lock in devices.
This 2020 paper is great at breaking down some of the extensions: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/woot20-paper-heinze.pdf
I do rather hope perhaps perhaps perhaps the EU & DMA or other may perhaps bend Apple off their rotten course of making non-standard bespoke systems. It seems like very recently the EU is getting ready to cave & abandon all their demands for trying to use standards, that their fear of the US is about to make them fold on insisting upon better. Demanding Apple stop doing everything in bespoke incompatible ways is something that should have happened a long time ago, imo, and it's so horrifying to see one of the only stands in my lifetime against the propeietarization & domination of systems by a bespoke corporate lord abandoned.
There's some rays of hope here & there. Seemoo Lab has a ton of amazing reverse engineering efforts, figuring out how many many many undocumented locked down Apple systems & protocols work & trying to give control back. This is the highest virtue, the best hacker nature. Here's Open Wireless Link, but they have so many other amazing projects they've similarly figured out out to pry open. Amazing best human spirit. https://github.com/seemoo-lab/owl
Though I wonder why it works with Linux, which I assume doesn't have code for a special handshake specific to AirPods
I use wired headphones to study with Anki (AnkiDroid) because I've found most (inexpensive) Bluetooth headphones require a second or two to begin playing. As I'm dealing with short audio clips, this use case necessitates restarting the "audio playing" situation every few seconds.
Maybe the app developers could "play" quiet audio between these short clips. But barring such a development, I'd like to know if higher quality headphones might suffer from less latency in this regard.
1-2 seconds is an eon for audio latency so I guess something else is going on than anything BT related in the headphones. Unless you have particularly bad luck in what headphones you use.
FWIW, I use a variety of cheap and not so cheap BT headphones across multiple devices and apps including AnkiDroid and have not perceived any latency.
If switching to wired removes the latency then it does seem to indicate something in the BT stack of your device. I wonder if you experience the lag when using AnkiDroid + BT on another device.
> Need fix please
> original engineers got laid off thats why
Apple mercy-killed Adobe Flash, we should be asking they do the same to Bluetooth. I'm sick of living in a reality where no one thinks to make something better. It has to be possible.
They won't, because it turns out Bluetooth is the best thing we have at "discover nearby devices". Guess how Apple TV/screen sharing detection, iPhone hotspot detection and configuration, AirDrop and a whole host of other features work without communicating via some cloud mothership? They are all using Bluetooth to do detection and negotiation to a high-bandwidth link!
Amongst widespread radio communication mechanisms, there are only NFC, Bluetooth and WiFi. NFC is sometimes used to provision wifi passwords, but it's short-range to the tune of a few cm tops. WiFi has discovery, but nothing in the protocol to make sure initial conversations cannot be eavesdropped, and low-power wifi stacks are hard to do, in contrast to Bluetooth with BTLE.
> Bluetooth DID (Device Identification) Hook > Turns out, if you change the manufacturerid to that of Apple, you get access to several special features!
I hope Apple gets slammed hard by some regulatory body. Apparently there's absolutely zero magic reasons why their airpods are unable to connect to non-Apple devices; pretend you're an iPhone and you're in.
EDIT: read "unable to connect" => "unable to expose advanced functionality", ofc they connect just fine
So f*ing steamed. Still. And Apple support had no clue and kept telling me it should all 'Just Work'.
It's not AirPods being closed that's unfair. Apple should be able to sell first party tech that only works with their own products.
What's unfair is Apple locking everyone else out. Not allowing or documenting for third parties to use the same APIs to enable something like automatic device switching in third party bluetooth headphones is the unfair part.
Same goes for the watch. That the Apple Watch only works with iPhone isn't the problem. The problem is no other third party is able to make a smartwatch that competes on an level playing field with the Apple Watch on Apple Devices, because Apple locks them out.
lock-out is the unfair problem.
Or am I missing something that distinguishes between these two in your view?
If I had large amounts of spare money, I’d love to seed small endeavours that (according to my personal world view) made the world incrementally better.
As has been noted before, what’s the point of having ‘FU money’ if you don’t use it to say ‘FU’ now and again?
I know that used to be the case a few years ago at least, but I'm not sure if it's still true.
about the configs not being saved- do you mean the conversational awareness, adaptive volume etc.? those should be saved, and sent from airpods every time you connect. so if you change the config from any other device, and connect to your phone then the app should show the new config.
you can contirbute by supporting the development, of course! :)
As a casual trombone player, who often plays in louder settings, the airpods pro are almost excellent hearing protection. Passive (even "audiophile" or "concert") earplugs make me feel like I'm under water. Airpods Pro attenuate a lot of sound but don't feel so unnatural.
Unfortunately, they tend to drop my own sound out of the mix when sounds around me get louder.
I'd love a mode that selectively let in more trombone frequencies, or better, that mixed noise cancellation and transparency to give me more of a studio monitor effect. Maybe the airpods could figure out which sounds were mine via the buzzing sounds that propagate through my head from my lips.
Did you have to do anything special?
Edit: I noticed that the article's page title is also misspelled this way.
Still baffles me why the first gen airpod "button" wasn't the winner, but unfortunately Steve's no longer with us.
Something needs to make it very expensive and feel exclusive… Yes, you can have AirPods with noise cancellation, but you need a 1k€ iPhone to go with that.
AirPods noise cancellation can be controlled by holding the AirPod stalk.
And that’s not an excuse or a workaround: That’s how I always do it. I’ve never bothered doing it through software on my iDevices, because that’s much more cumbersome.
How do I know this is done purposefully and not just because AirPods 3 are so new and different from AirPods 2? Well, macOS has been neglected of late, and Apple didn't find the time to break things there, so Airpods 3 work with macOS just as well as Airpods 2 did — switching modes, battery status display, etc.
It's very disappointing, and not a great customer experience.
The “it just works” argument keeps falling apart.
I’ve already moved over to Linux for my laptop and desktop experience. I only use my iPad to remote into my desktop at this point and use it as my travel laptop. Turns out I don’t really need an iPad.
While I haven’t managed to find anything close to an answer using google, chatgpt is quite confident it’s because of Bluetooth versions.
Surely Bluetooth 5 is backwards compatible, but then again if the AirPods thinks it’s connected to an iOS device it seems reasonable that it will start using all the proprietary iOS features and then communication breaks down.
So to me, liberation of airpods is an on-device issue.
Android obviously is out of the game totally for AirPods - no spacial audio, no changes of ANC, no battery level, but at least ANC modes can be changed on AirPods directly, and button press works to answer calls, and pause/play audio, and also volume control works.
I'm three-generation Airpods Pro (around 5 years) user on Android and Macbook (no iPhone at all). In first and second generation there was a "bug" (or intentional feature) that even when connected to Android, and not being connected to my Mac, the latter was showing the charge level on both Airpods, but at some point it was removed.
In first and second generation I had an issue with one AirPod making strange noises, in both cases even Apple Support at the Genius Bar didn't know what to make out of it that I don't use AirPods with iPhone, but only with a Mac (and Android).
Literally all other earpieces work flawlessly with that phone including dirt cheap chinese stuff, apart from apple.
Now somebody could come and claim multi trillion company couldnt just nail that pesky bluetooth protocol well, but everybody else can do it better than them, including 15 bucks products. Its all by design. They clearly dont need hardware revenue to have products who can compete on open market, they need their closed ecosystem revenue, hence these dirty practices. There is hopefully a billion or ten lawsuit in the making by courts with balls, ie EU.
All the downvotes in the world won't change above.
I've had almost all of the versions of AirPods and AirPod Pros and they have connected to non-Apple devices just fine.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45882203
And DMA/DSA are also getting nerfed :(
It's basically the consequence Google v. Oracle and the cases leading to it.
They should be slammed by Bluetooth body and forbidden to use bluetooth technology for hurting interoperability.
If they would be smart, they would financially support this project, as it is going to bring more sales, from users who anyway wouldn't switch to iPhone.
They’ve always been able to.
The ignorance of Apple haters never ceases to amaze.
They can and should do better though by android.
Btw it's not some magic feature set they spent years to research. Sub $60 Soundcores have most of them if not all.
Are we really at the point where people expect big brother to handle our headphone issues?
And AirPods do connect to non Apple devices. They are just limited to doing what BT spec allows and no more
Please stop spreading FUD
It’s the extra convenience features integrated into iOS and macOS to change certain settings that have been reverse engineered here. And you can’t actually even use them without rooting your phone and applying a patch to Android’s Bluetooth stack.
Is it? You have to link me to the iOS patches that iPhone users have written to enable Pixel Buds on iOS.
Or maybe it's not exactly the same.
Whataboutism and cynicism about the status quo notwithstanding, I do agree BT protocol and adherence to it could be improved though.
What a silly feature list the AirPods have, too. Transparency? I use earbuds to avoid having to hear the outside world. Ear Detection? My phone does the same thing with my default music app when it detects the jack plugged back in. Multiple devices (up to two)? lol. Head Gestures? How many people even answer the phone at all now after years of relentless spam? Conversational Awareness? I got a $3 clip to attach the wire to my shirt collar, and if I talk to someone or someone talks to me I yank one or both buds out and let them dangle freely with no worry of getting lost or stolen: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08BL44TW4
I would be totally down to adopt a new paradigm if it was actually better in any way I cared about, but it's just not and never was. People seem to like 'em a lot, though, so I'm still glad to see these supported on non-Apple gear :)
What a silly thing to dismiss a product over. The transparency levels are actually a great feature. You can go from noise cancelling to being able to have a perfect conversation with someone or listen for the kids with a quick squeeze of the earbud. I use it all the time.
Likewise your comment that it’s superior to buy a separate clip and attach the wire to yourself so people can yank them out is just asinine. Or is this parody? It’s hard to tell.
This whole comment feels like someone trying to convince themselves that the thing they didn’t buy is actually terrible and bad, so they can pat themself on the back for not buying it.
It takes effort even for the fanboys, but they are not going to tell you the hoops they jump through even in the Apple Soma Bubble (delete delete "Ecosystem"). You are expected to have the latest semi-broken iOS to even call your latest gen airpods airpods instead of generic bt audio devices lol. Let alone trying to make anything Apple work in Android.
I see the reason to liberate this corporate BT bullshit as a matter of principle, but I don't see the point of Apple fanboys today. In the 90s Apple was light years ahead of wintel, but today they are worse and more expensive than high end brands (etymotic for example) who don't engage in the silly marketing blending of brand and personal self worth the fanboys seem to ingest as if their life depends on it. They strike me as impoverished third worlders who think their internet cred will go up by buying Apple gear. Apple used to really mean "It Just Works", but not anymore by any stretch. On the other hand, the peace of mind of solving a problem for good and forgetting about it, like -radical idea- headphone jacks (removed because "courage"), using a stable environment on a computer you own with an environment you can recreate instead of the Apple merry-go-round, using your own infrastructure and ideas instead of hoping the Apple "Magic" will work when you really need to restore a backup. And when the Apple Machine(TM) eats your superior Apple creations, you simply were holding it wrong, man! Makes me wonder what the rest of the engineering world is thinking... for example, when are HiFi manufacturers going to ditch slimy, unseemly, dusty speaker cables for superior bluetooth sound quality? Why o why are Canon/Sony/Leica/etc still going with environmentally unfriendly, inefficient, heavy and dumb 35 mm image sensors? Don't they know about the miraculous-camera-assembly in iPhones? All 50 MP crammed not in 35 mm but in half the size, now that's sweet!
The idiocies keep coming, like "nano-textured" glass in Apple monitors that simply rehash the professional displays that for years have had accurate color reproduction, superior brightness, and -god forbid- matte screens. I think I must have a long-lost engineering prototype of a monitor with a superior, believed lost forever "nano-textured" glass. It's called matte screen, and it came in the superior display ratio called 16:10 once used by the dinosaurs instead of the retarded craze of everything you can dream of as long as it's 16:9 lol.
Apple fanboys: your identity brand has long since eroded, but by all means keep those credit cards warm, you need to finance the next Tim Cook yatch :)
Appletooth being a from-scratch all-new, cleanly-designed protocol that makes actual sense and is easy to implement by vendors without inherent security flaws.
I won't lie, it would be a horrifically painful transition. But it would be worth it. Apple should have some courage when it's actually called for (...not killing hardware ports, which no consumer was asking for).
I've never used iPhones and have stuck by Google Pixel. I still feel all of the above in my heart. Apple's the only one who can possibly fulfill my dream of Bluetooth's bitter end.
I will suggest to the app developers to add optional silence. Thank you.
Once paired, AirPods just work like any other bluetooth headphones.
I meant to add it here
All this is pretty much inspired by the fears of the big car companies. But we're also buying a lot less American cars, Tesla for example has been decimated in Europe. And besides them there's only really Ford.
Besides Trump constantly changes the rules. For example with his 'trade deficit' he's only looking at goods, not services. When you consider the huge amount of money going to Microsoft, AWS, Google, there's not really any deficit. Trump just makes it all up as he goes along. You can't really respond seriously to that because you don't know what will happen tomorrow, he could change his mind again.
https://android-review.googlesource.com/q/status:open+-is:wi...
I tried back in the day.
You're right that the text you're thinking of used to be in that space, if you mean the "About" blurb.
But you're not right about the page contents. The "About" is github metadata, just like the partial commit message "android: multidevice capabilites and accessiblit..." that you can also find. And just like that message, it was full of typos because it's not public-facing.
But there is an actual page talking about the project, which is what we're all commenting on here, and which never contained the typo.
Each member of a coordinated set gets its own Bluetooth battery level slot, so there's no problem here. The spec supports this use case natively.
This thread is full of weird misinformation.
They also Open Source the base OS layer pieces for macOS too:
* https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/
* https://opensource.apple.com/releases/
I don't keep any kind of close eye on this stuff though.
The issue can be resolved because an android bug can be debugged by a contributor. A similar issue can't even be analyzed from the apple side by anyone but an apple employee.
We are assuming there are bugs in iOS, but their closed sourceness can mislead people to believe there aren't. Then, yes, their vertical integration makes them rich, which in this case is bad for users, in the guise of being good.
Lock-out is Apple preventing third parties from making accessories that can match the first party ones in feature parity and seamlessness.
Apple Watch only working with iPhones=lock-in
No third party watch being allowed to use the same APIs the Apple Watch does or not being allowed to access iMessage, Apple Pay, etc = lock-out.
It's the same thing.
If i offer to bring you fresh breakfast in the morning but not offer the service to other apartments down the street -> „lock in“
If i do not allow you to get your breakfast (of equal quality)elsewhere -> „lock out“
1. If I'm building a gadget for my line of products, I want to be able to test it only with my products. I don't want to spend money to make it work with anybody's else products. There are standards but there are bugs and non compliant products from known and unknown parties, their problems.
2. However I might also want to be able to build gadgets for somebody's else products, so I appreciate if those companies stick to standards and don't go out of their ways to make their products incompatible with gadgets of third parties. BTW, this reminds me about cartridges for inkjet printers.
So I think that it would be fair for Apple to say, "these earpieces are tested to work only on these products of mine: ...; if they happen to work on something else: congratulations! you got lucky." It won't be fair if they make their products incompatible with every other earpieces and at the same time claim that they are compliant to a standard.
But fairness and business are often at odds.
https://www.bluetooth.com/specifications/specs/core-specific...
The Battery Service 1.0 spec was officially adopted in 2011:
https://www.bluetooth.com/specifications/specs/battery-servi...
The first airpods were released in 2016...
Please consider that simping for a trillion dollar company might actually not be in your best personal interests...
Product tying is not a thing you can bypass.
This is idea is independent of whether Apple’s strategy is good or bad, legal or not. Product tying can’t be undermined, or it’s not actually a problem.
1 year 11 months :)
The old 30-pin connector before Lightning came from 2003.
Meanwhile it took until 2023 for iPhones to use USB-C.
30-pin 2003 - 2012 (2014)
Lighting 2012 - 2023 (2025)
USB-C AAPL utter mess -
iPhone 2023 -
USB-C RoW 2014 -Do console makers have to make sure that their accessories work with other consoles? Do TV manufacturers have to ensure their remotes work with other TVs?
And no you never had to buy Apple branded or licensed charging cables.
Apple, like every other vendor, does not have a choice but to implement this as a proprietary characteristic. Pre-BLE, other vendors copied Apple's de-facto `HFP AT+IPHONEACCEV` standard for reporting battery levels to the OS.
They could publish the details, and not block other manufacturer details, so that it is easier for other platforms to develop drivers for them. Or develop a new standard that works for their earbuds.
companies actually can build and ship stuff that isn't inter-operable with the world, this is Actually Good for user experience
- Multi-device Connectivity
- Accessibility Settings and Hearing Aid
While the following are exclusive to Apple devices for market reasons:
- Receive Battery Information
- Set/Receive ANC Modes
- Set Adaptive Audio Noise settings
- Receive In-Ear detection Status
- Personalized Volume (use at your own risk - might randomly boost volume to some high level)
- Conversational Awareness
- Ear Detection
- Siri (Voice assistant on long stem press)
- Hold and Press configuration
- Head Tracking (for Spatial Audio and Head Gestures)
- Rename AirPods
https://github.com/kavishdevar/librepods/issues/20
I imagine limiting such features to Apple devices is more about incentivizing the Apple Ecosystem than quality or software concerns
As a neurodivergent person I lack the innate human skill to filter voices out of a cacaphony of noise so loud bars etc are hell. There also the "talking with earphones in is rude" but that's an issue that can just be explained.
Needing root to enable it is a major deal-breaker though :( and moving to an iPhone is impossible for me. Too much stuff that's not supported.
They have a basic app for some of their other devices like the Beats line. One other thing you simply can't do without pairing AirPods with an Apple device is enrol them in AppleCare One.
Care to offer a justification for why this is the case without resorting to "the multi-trillion-dollar behemoth can't be bothered to build an app"?
In their defence, they went with Lightning shortly before the USB-C spec was finalized. Then, to avoid their customers being screwed over by constantly changing the connector, they kind of had to stick with it for a decade.
People will complain if they push features that are ahead of the spec, and they'll complain if they let the spec be finalized before they use it. Being guided by "What's the best we can do for UX, assuming out users are our users in every product category we enter" seems to be their reasonable middle ground.
In my country (India), Apple still doesn't sell charger and cable along with its new iDevices, even though those gadgets are exorbitantly expensive. And Apple doesn't allow custom repair here, even though my country mandated the Right to Repair, like EU did so. My old Mac Mini 2012 is gathering dust in a cupboard, because Apple service center refused to upgrade it to new RAM and new SATA SSD, citing Apple policies.
Like within minutes, with no big changes?
I didn't think it's rare that a company refuses to do any work on devices they no longer support. Their employees will no longer be trained to do this work, hence they'd have a nontrivial chance of causing damages. That's exactly why a right to repair is so important, so that other people can pick up their slack
They seem to work just fine, yeah.
The SSD is a bit more fiddly, but can also be done at home. Check iFixit.
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Mac+mini+Late+2012+Hard+Drive+R...
I was asking about multi-device connectivity, which is a slightly more advanced feature that lots of other earbuds can do in a cross-platform way.
Less friction for devices like passkeys, external hard drives, etc.
It doesn't seem like they were keen on moving that down the product line since they had to be dragged kicking and screaming to do so.
Imagine if every human on the planet would operate like this.
We'd be back in the Stone Ages.
> companies actually can build and ship stuff that isn't inter-operable with the world, this is Actually Good for user experience
...
god forbid someone prioritize concrete user experience over abstract interoperability
But you've inspired me to gather courage and do the DIY upgrade myself next month during the holidays. No use having a working PC lying unused, merely because it is very sluggish due to old hardware. Wish me luck (for the upgrade), I think I'll need it.
https://www.bluetooth.com/specifications/specs/multi-profile...
They support HFP and A2DP and AVRCP, and properly, including all of those features working on android phones and proper switching between them as needed...
How you could argue that this is a good thing tells me you're either too drunk on the corporate kool-aid or that you have some financial incentive to ignore the obvious problems with these facts.
Either way this is my last message in this thread as googling things for you is a bore.
Just like Microsoft there are parts of the company who are hostile to open source, and there parts of the company whose success is attributable to open source.
Apple cooperates within WebKit well with WebKitGtk. They supported LLVM when it is in their interest.
Chrome is used as proprietary web-engine to vendor lock-in the web. While often used by others, I’m not aware of a broad cooperation. Android is a shadow of Linux, merely using the Linux-Kernel, not GNU. Plus a lot of closed-source code (PlayServices, App Signatures, Google Cloud, Google Apps).
Googles open-source projects seem often exclusive Google only projects? Google works together with others! But especially Chrome and AOSP are…causing worries.
This is about whether they contribute to open source or not.
Swift is OSS, but it's not a great example to illustrate your point.
Darwin’s underlying code was BSD license and didn’t require releasing source code.
It seems like every other message gets downgraded to SMS.
That's not Apple's fault per se, but of course, they contribute to it. They should open up the iMessage protocol.
I agree that some of the content produced in that era was great and it was nice to have tools available, but using Flash and doing the whole browser plugin thing was not great at all.
It’s actually great now that we have actual standards compliant ways of doing animations and other things in the browser without restricting it to one company’s little domain that must be used as a plugin for browsers.
Mind you that the first iPhone cake with 128MB RAM with a 400Mhz processor.
An iPhone with the theoretical specs didn’t come out until 2011.
Also see the first “iPad Killer” the Motorola Xoom’s marquee feature was suppose to be that it could run Flash. But Adobe was late releasing the Xoom in the unenviable problem of that you couldn’t view its home page on the device.
Flash the player was insecure unoptimized laggy garbage
There were cool games, but there still are cool games. And the indie/hacker/homebrew gaming ecosystems are bigger, richer, and more accessible than ever (due in no small part to the web, both as a gaming platform and for learning/community).
Similarly, the only reason Flash had “bad performance” on low end devices is because people were using it to do stuff that web tech could not do. It took over a decade for web tech to catch up, and 20 years later we still don’t have tooling that’s as good as Flash was (other than Adobe Animate itself).
Calling it “terrible for video” is completely backwards! Flash became the standard for video on the web for years because everything else was terrible and Flash was the only thing that worked. There’s a reason that YouTube used Flash to play videos for the first ten years.
If there's ever a project for an alternative OSS Flash authoring tool, something intended to be as accessible as Flash 5 or so, I'd love to contribute somehow
Apple begged Adobe to ship a working Flash mobile build at least four times and each time they rejected it for all sorts of various UX or performance issues. At one point Apple asked for and was delivered Flash Player source code, which they reportedly couldn't get to compile. Adobe tried to brand Flash as an open standard, and then went over Apple's head by just shipping an AIR runtime that could be packaged into an IPA and submitted to Apple. Jobs then wrote the infamous "Thoughts on Flash" letter, which was really there to justify going scorched-earth and banning all third-party development tools. This only lasted for about three months before the Obama DOJ threatened to sue[0].
Also, Steve Jobs was probably pissed off that he couldn't get the CEO of Adobe on speed-dial. At that point in time everyone involved with shipping iPhone software was in his contacts and in regular contact with him. Google logo looks weird on the phone screen? Have Jobs call Page and get it fixed in 10 minutes.
As it stood after that moment, Flash was a viable development platform for iPhone apps and remained so for many years. This is entirely separate from its use in the browser. Practically speaking, you have probably played plenty of Flash games on iOS without even knowing it, because all the hard work of building touch-friendly UX and a performant UI was shunted over to the developers of individual games rather than trying to make, say, the core Flash rendering model GPU capable[1].
Adobe then shipped Flash Player for Android to huge fanfare, and it sucked just as hard as it did on Apple's dev iPhones and was unceremoniously canned a year later.
At this point it was obvious Flash Player needed a rewrite, even within Adobe, so they announced "FP Next" along with an AS4 language for new movies to run in. Except the Adobe execs were angry about the cost so they tried to shake down their customers for the funds. They wanted any cross-compiled 3D engine code to have to pay a revshare to Adobe. Everyone jumped ship to Unity, so Adobe canned the revshare requirement... and FP Next/AS4, the thing that was supposed to modernize Flash's aging codebase.
And then right after Adobe starts disinvesting from Flash, a bunch of CVEs land and all the browser vendors pushed hard to actually, once and for all, excise plugins from the browser. That was the actual mercy kill, but it was preceded by almost a decade in which all the people who knew how Flash actually worked didn't have the budget to fix it, and all the people who wanted it fixed didn't have the expertise to do it.
[0] For the record, Obama was the guy who saw Zuckerberg illegally buying Instagram to keep people from moving off of Facebook and said "sure thing, wave it through".
[1] There's an AS3 project called Starling that gives you hardware rendering by pre-rendering a bunch of assets in advance into bitmaps, which kind of betrays the whole point of Flash. But I also can't imagine Adobe doing it any other way as the Flash renderer was both highly optimized and bespoke.
Flash had an awesome ecosystem. But it was too fragile, and Adobe is too incompetent of a company to be a good steward of that kind of tech.
It had a great number of CVEs, you mean?
_modern_ HTML and JS have eclipsed flash in all meaningful ways.
In truth, the Web has eclipsed Flash, the player, but not the product.
There's a reason most of these projects picked AOSP over iOS, or even Chromium over WebKit. Google just engages with the community better than Apple. It's silly to pretend like they're on the same level.
I wonder why they didn't just go and open-source the entire damn thing, all its commercial value has been lost anyway.
If you're wondering what would actually block a FOSS release of the Flash Player runtime, here you go:
- Sorenson Spark, a half-finished H.263 implementation.
- On2 VP6
- Likewise, their H.264 or MP3 decoders, which were almost certainly third-party libraries as well.
- The "advanced text rendering engine" added in SWFv8 to replace legacy font rendering, which I know was licensed but I forgot which company.
- Adobe DRM
The media codecs would be replaceable with any number of FOSS implementations. I've[1] personally written a clean-room decoder for Sorenson-flavor H.263 in Rust, and the APIs for these libraries tend to be pretty simple and easy to wire up. Font rendering would potentially be more invasive to the codebase. And DRM is basically high-grade radioactive waste to FOSS projects. The main problem is that this wouldn't be "just compile Flash from source" anymore, you'd be making an "OpenFlash" fork with at least some compatibility breaks involved.
And to be clear, Adobe actually had some interest in opening Flash Player. They released a bunch of technical specifications for the SWF format - albeit, hilariously inadequate and inaccurate ones. AS3 in particular was supposed to be a web standard, in the form of ES4, or "JavaScript 2.0". Adobe actually released their AVM2 implementation, avmplus, specifically with the goal of it replacing SpiderMonkey in Firefox. This never worked out[2], but they kept updating the avmplus GitHub right up until the death of Flash.
The underlying problem with both "opening up Flash Player" and "porting Flash to iPhone" is that Adobe management was not terribly interested in doing things that did not have a direct connection to bottom-line revenue. If they were willing to open Flash, they would have also invested into their platform instead of trying to find a way to bilk money out of people cross-compiling Unity to Flash.
I think the best goodwill move Adobe could make now, in 2025, would be to specifically release the renderer component of Flash. They own it completely, the copyright pedigree goes all the way back to Jonathan Gay, and it does a lot of specific things that no other SWF runtime implementation gets quite right. It would be an absolutely amazing object of study.
[0] https://www.theregister.com/2018/03/14/a_dolby_sues_adobe_fo...
[1] To be clear, several other interested Ruffle contributors helped me actually get it decoding video (especially some broken files) and doing so efficiently.
[2] I'm not a fan of him but I hear Brendan Eich stalks these forums. He probably has better insights on the backlash to ES4 than I do.
Apple MFI certifies USB-C cables also, so I'm not sure if it is throttling its iDevices to be finicky with non-MFI USB-C cables.
I know for a fact that Apple did software updates to older iPhones to make them sluggish and drain battery quickly. I realised this when I went to Apple Genius Bar to get my iPhone 7 Plus battery replaced after it started draining too quickly daily, but even with new battery same problem persisted. The friendly staff member unofficially told me it is because of the recent software updates by Apple for older iPhones, and advised not to hold out hope that any future software update will fix the problem. Even a year later, his warning remained true. I gave away the iPhone to my nephew as a backup device for his studies, but he sold it soon, as it was a nightmare to keep charging it frequently.
Apple has faced multiple fines for deliberately slowing down older iPhones without informing users, including a €25 million fine in France and a $41 million fine for deceptive marketing practices. The company admitted to slowing down devices to prevent unexpected shutdowns due to aging batteries, but critics argued it was misleading.
These days, I wouldn't trust Apple with a barge pole, let alone the money from my wallet.
These cases are much less convincing than they may seem if you just take a moment to read about them. iDevices would throttle the cpu to make the battery last longer as it's capacity falls, this kind of throttling is not uncommon and not malicious.
This wasn't misleading, and isn't something that warrants any genuine criticism.
Support is very expensive. Say what you want about Apple, but they provide absolutely stellar support, especially with the stupidly inexpensive Apple Care insurance. This is only cost effective if they can make reasonable predictions about how their devices will behave in any given scenario. Interfacing Apple hardware with non-certified (MFi, BLE, etc) third party hardware has a non-trivial risk of unpredictability high support costs, either from excessive Apple Care claims, customer support communications, or just overloading the Genius Bar.
Reducing support cost could easily explain the motivation of the entire walled garden if they are sufficiently high.
Because they needed a way to get audio to the AirPods wirelessly and to work with their devices? That’s a pretty good reason to use Bluetooth.
I doubt they got together and tried to scheme a way to break Bluetooth in this one tiny little way for vendor lock in. You can use the basic AirPod features with other Bluetooth devices. It’s just these extended features that were never developed for other platforms.
HN comments lean heavily conspiratorial but I think the obvious explanation is that the devs built and tested it against iPhone and Mac targets and optimized for that. This minor discrepancy wasn’t worked around because it isn’t triggered on Apple platforms and it’s not a target for them.
Some pictures here: https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/b1u08k/this_...
No conspiracy needed, surely it would be unilateral? It seems exactly the sort of thing Apple Computers would do to protect their ecosystem.
Truth is, no one has the full facts so any reasons as to why this was made the way it was is pure speculation. Only a fool would move to condemn or endorse what is not yet fully understood.
And what do you mean by "conspiracy"? I would be shocked to find out this was done by some lone wolf and wasn't built with broad (even if grumbly) consensus in the relevant teams. That's how corporate software is built.
Ugh, trillion dollar market value doesn't mean they are incapable of making a basic android app. Check their move to ios app if you have any doubts.
You can't do that, you certainly agreed to binding arbitration with apple at some point.
Unpopular opinion in these parts, but I think yes, they should be able to (continue) to sell products with lock in.
Where Apple should get in trouble is specifically locking others out, rather than locking their own stuff in. If Apple wants to make a smartwatch that only works with iPhones, fine. What they shouldn't be able to do is block (either intentionally or via undocumented/private APIs and TOS violations) third parties from making a smartwatch for iPhone that can compete on the same playing field as the Apple Watch, with access to all of the same features.
Same goes for all tech companies. If you want to lock-in your own first party products, fine, but you absolutely should not be allowed to lock-out others.
Let's say I'm Samsung and I want to make a phone that works with the Apple Watch. Isn't the Apple Watch locking me out? Apple is preventing third party devices from working with the Apple Watch.
Besides, I think this will create surprise and confusion for less technical users. In my experience, many will blame the incompatibility on whichever device is new, without understanding who is gating out whom. And even for technical users, consider CarPlay and Android Auto: From the phone’s perspective, the car is a peripheral, and that makes sense; but lots of people will still consider the car the “core device.”
I'm not a fanboy but I never use Airpods with any Apple product and I can use them properly without any hiccup with several others (windows, linux and android).
Maybe there's something up with your phone?
Then it has to accomodate every other intersted party, many of which hate each other. Apple has always been a bit of an odd duck ("Think Different" has been internalized for some time), but Verizon actively hates OTT messaging as they can't charge for it. Samsung would rather run their own RCS implementation to create and advertise "Samsung RCS", and Google can't push too hard without getting EU attention for antitrust (again).
RCS has been stuck in limbo-hell for years for multiple reasons, none of which are easy.
This is a problem no other vendors have, and is solely caused by Apple.
https://www.androidauthority.com/android-iphone-rcs-messagin...
> Apple is a private company
Except for the biggest obstacle of it all in capitalism: capital.
If that's the only way anyone can try to change companies' behaviours we are in a lot of trouble :)
The argument about whether they ought to is in some other thread I imagine, you might have lost your way. I don't own their airpods so in this particular instance, IDC about the outcome.
Caps for emphasis, not frustration.
You will not find this quick battery drain problem in Motorola, Nokia, Oppo, Sony, etc. Their phones last several years even with ageing batteries. An 10+ years old Oppo phone I have, still holds almost full charge at idle, throughout the day.
As batteries get older, their capacity to hold charge reduces, but if a phone battery is draining too fast even in idle mode, it is likely due to software, not hardware. And if it is due to software, then the manufacturer company is to blame.
That would either require hurting the battery life on all models or require distinguishable behaviours that only occur on specific models and would be relatively simple to prove through reverse engineering.
Apple has been fined for the throttling, but hasn't ever been credibly accused of actually deliberately taking steps to reduce battery life on older devices.
I need to know individual levels to do that
This entire thread started with you claiming Apple was somehow trying to prevent issues by hiding these features, and you've twice tried to move the goalposts to irrelevant points when given evidence to the contrary.
If you can't even defend your original position then I have no interest in continuing a discussion with Apple's most useful idiot.
The reality is the sort of compatibility being talked about is a new feature with design choices, not just unwired functionality.
I'd rather them work on features to report charging time or expected playback time on iOS, or write their own app for Android, than try to arbitrarily increase their bluetooth profile compatibility checklist.
But you can have an extension cord which accepts USB on one end but doesn't accept USB on the other.
So the keyboard has a superset connector so that it can go in regular USB and notched USB, because it is verified to work right when using the extension cord.
This design also means you can't plug one extension cord into another to get an even longer distance (which the keyboard wouldn't expect). Pretty clever solution.
Darwin is also a bad example:
"On July 25, 2006, the OpenDarwin team announced that the project was shutting down, as they felt OpenDarwin had "become a mere hosting facility for Mac OS X related projects", and that the efforts to create a standalone Darwin operating system had failed.[40] They also state: "Availability of sources, interaction with Apple representatives, difficulty building and tracking sources, and a lack of interest from the community have all contributed to this."[41]"
"PureDarwin is a project to create a bootable operating system image from Apple's released source code for Darwin.[43] Since the halt of OpenDarwin and the release of bootable images since Darwin 8.x, it has been increasingly difficult to create a full operating system as many components became closed source."
As additional evidence, there are "AirPods-like" earbuds on the market such as the Sony WF-C700N, which have no problem reporting three battery levels over standard Bluetooth on e.g. Linux.
[0] https://www.bluetooth.com/wp-content/uploads/Files/Specifica...
The Bluetooth Battery Service spec allows for a single device with multiple batteries
On the subject of the multi-trillion-dollar behemoth, Apple is a private company. If you have the capital, you can acquire a controlling interest and then they’ll work on whatever you like. Until then, you’re out of luck.
No, it's not. The Bluetooth Battery Service spec allows for a single device with multiple batteries and individual battery reporting for each. [0] They even give the example in that doc of earbuds which are one “logical device” but two physically separate pieces, each with its own battery.
> On the subject of the multi-trillion-dollar behemoth, Apple is a private company.
Apple is, by definition, a public company.
> If you have the capital, you can acquire a controlling interest and then they’ll work on whatever you like. Until then, you’re out of luck.
No. Anticompetitive behavior such as tying (what I would argue is happening here) can and should always be subject to examination, criticism, and possible litigation by the public.
[0] https://www.bluetooth.com/wp-content/uploads/Files/Specifica...
Companies are not acts of God or nature. They are a private company operating on a society that allows it to exist because it is believed to be the for the public good. The public has very much the right to question it's practices, and if they are anti consumer, monopolistic, or a list of other things, to correct them. Shareholders be damned.
Like a lot of parts of the (especially earlier revisions of) Bluetooth spec the battery status took a slapdash approach to defining things. Look at anyone who's used Bluetooth on Windows to see what a nightmare interoperability still is. So Apple released ear buds that implement poorly defined parts of the spec but otherwise work with third party bluetooth devices, and that's bad?
Yikes.
Meanwhile, the Bluetooth SIG released an update at the end of 2022 that actually starts to require some sort of standardization. You know who's name was on that little update? Big bad awful anticompetitive Apple.
It's not uncommon (at least for me) to have a low earbud battery level (because I've just binged Slow Horses) or a low container battery (because I've just charged the earbuds from the container for the third time and drained the container). There's a suggestion above that you should "just choose the lowest one because 99% of the time that's what you're interested in", except that's not true in the second case.
I'm fairly sure that if you could report both, then Apple would report both using this hypothetical standard method, but since you can't, and there's no easy way to just "choose one" without misleading the user about something, they choose to do it properly, even though that means it's an Apple-only thing.
Samsung not being able to make a phone to work with Apples first party accessory isn’t the problem.
The problem is Samsung can’t make a watch that functions on par with the Apple Watch on iPhones.
Having first party, integrated accessories is fine. Locking out third party accessories is the issue.
Whatever Apple makes first party for the iPhone , third parties should also be able to make for the iPhone with the same level of access and functionality.
Heck, I don't really think of my Apple Watch as an accessory. Mine has its own LTE connection; it does need to be connected to an iPhone during initial setup, but after that I don't think there's anything stopping me from giving my phone away and using the watch by itself. Many of the children I teach have an Apple Watch but don't own a phone yet.
Exactly how is Apple going to send information to none Apple devices using the BT protocol in a method that they can understand?
Hyper-fixating on an issue with one part of the spec doesn't dismiss the larger problem being discussed. It's baffling (and kind of sad) how hard you guys feel the need to defend a trillion dollar company making obviously anti-consumer decisions.
If you know the average of those three, what does it tell you?
What other manufacturers have figured out how to report three devices that represent to a Bluetooth host as one device in a standards conforming way that will work across multiple hosts?
It’s not that I am defending a trillion dollar company - the idea of averaging three completely different devices is non sensical and provides absolutely no benefit to the end user. If you want ti complain about anyone - complain about the standards body.
This entire thread started with someone trying to claim that Apple was not in the wrong by restricting these features, of which battery reporting is A SINGLE ONE.
No, I don't have a perfect solution for this one specific part of the problem, but that's also not been the my focus the entire time. Getting dragged into the weeds only serves to distract from the actually important point here, which is that what Apple is doing is anti-consumer.
Let's first agree that Apple should play on even ground with everyone else, and then we can whinge over how to correctly report the battery of three components over a single connection. Yeesh.
RCS has been stuck in limbo-hell for several years, and I expect it to stay that way (to your point, I expect it to stay that way even if Apple chips in)
No, implementing multiple instances of the Battery Service to report battery state for several batteries has been there since the 1.0 spec. [0]
This spec was released in 2011, five years before the first AirPods were released.
Doing what several commenters claimed was impossible has in fact been possible with native Bluetooth for a decade and a half.
[0] https://www.bluetooth.org/docman/handlers/downloaddoc.ashx?d...
If you'd bothered to dig into the spec, v1.0 basically says do what you want. v1.1 defines a proper namespace and well known descriptions for multiple batteries. Apple did well to avoid the interoperability minefield.
> If you don't like the Apple device, use something else. It's not like a messaging platform where you'd need compatibility with other peoples' phones.
I own and use lots of devices, for both work and personal tasks, including Apple and non-Apple devices. I own a pair of AirPods. I'd like them to work well across all the platforms that I use. There is nothing technically preventing Apple from achieving this, aside from Apple's arguably illegal tying behavior.
> If you'd bothered to dig into the spec, v1.0 basically says do what you want. v1.1 defines a proper namespace and well known descriptions for multiple batteries. Apple did well to avoid the interoperability minefield.
I have read the spec; please don't accuse me of not reading it. Have you written Bluetooth device firmware before? In case you haven't, at a high level:
* The BT device exposes a "profile," which defines one or more "services", which are essentially different types of data that can be read from or written to the device.
* Multiple instances of the same type of service (the Battery Service in this case) can be exposed in the profile. I don't know if this ability was always present in the spec or was added after the fact, but it was, at minimum, present in 2011 when the BAS 1.0 spec was released.
* So, if your device has more than one battery, its profile will have an instance of the Battery Service defined for each one.
I will grant that the 1.1 spec document is a lot clearer and provides lots of diagrammed examples, but the only net new functionality in 1.1 are a set of new battery-related fields (these are called out near the beginning).
1.0 absolutely does not say "do what you want."
You claimed other manufacturers have “figured this out” - how?
Every single thing that you say Apple should do is about how Apple can do that in a method that conforms to the spec - you kind of have to “fixate” upon the spec if you claim that Apple isn’t conforming to the spec.
The battery reporting is the one you brought up and had only horrible ideas.
When a device has more than one instance of the Battery service, each Battery
Level characteristic shall include a Characteristic Presentation Format
descriptor that has a namespace/description value that is unique for that
instance of the Battery service.
When a device has more than one instance of the Battery Service, each Battery
Level characteristic shall include a Characteristic Presentation Format descriptor
(Volume 3, Part G, Section 3.3.3.5 in [1]) that has the Name Space field set to
”Bluetooth SIG” and the Description field set to a valid value from the GATT
Namespace Descriptors [4] and that is unique among all instances of the Battery
Service exposed by the GATT Server.