It's honestly amazing how Apple managed to dodge anti-trust in the United States.
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.
Long time Garmin watch user here and Garmins are also HORRIBLY crippled on iOS. Can I respond to a text message? No. I can clear the notification, but that is it. Apple Watch has far greater abilities than any other smart watch. That is the issue.
As someone who has a garmin watch and switched from android to iOS I can tell you it's exactly as crippled as the article spells out.
So if anything garmin has a healthy smartwatch business in spite of apple trying their hardest to choke competition.
My wife (iPhone user) has a Garmin watch that a friend of ours (Android user) recommended. The friend's experience is much much better, with many more features that work. Apple is definitely intentionally crippling the third-party smartwatch experience.
With as much functionality as there is on an Apple Watch I can see how that would be huge endeavor to accomplish while maintaining the tight security and privacy model.
I think the devil is in the details of how iOS and watchOS interact. Instead of sending and receiving texts from iOS, watchOS is running messages and only sharing data. I imagine this pattern works a large amount of the time in Apple's benefit. They make a notification API available for anyone to use, they just choose not to do it. They also make it so the watch can use the phone's data, and this they do use, but also it can use WiFi or Cellular on its own.
100% agree with those statements. It would be nice to have a more robust API and this more options but unless forced to I don’t see Apple doing that and honestly rightly so.
MS had a much larger market share than Apple does in any product category. They were something like 95% or more of the PC OS market. Apple has, in the US, around 50% of the smartphone market and around 15% of the PC market.
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).
Obviously this is going to be up for debate, but in your comment you acknowledge that "go build one for Android" is an option. This is an indication that your complaint is not in Apple's behavior, but your regret that the competition sucks and it's not Apple's fault. Apple is not a market on their own from the perspective of smart phones and watches, every person making a purchasing decision has options (This is different from an app developer's perspective. See the last line for the explanation of why that's different).
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.
> 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.
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 I'm not conflating things- Ford and Dodge filter incompatibility is almost directly comparable to a software company making API changes to be incompatible or to choose not to offer something they could easily include. And it's not just Ford and Dodge; practically every car maker chooses to make some parts that are proprietary. Oil filters are a particular easy one to compare to software practices.
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.
> 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.
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.
> preventing full compatibility with third party watches
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.
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.
> Apple is not a market on their own from the perspective of smart phones and watches.
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.
> But isn't that's the case Pebble is making here?
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.
> They didn't create a market in this case. They created a product, which is the Apple Watch.
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.
> But isn't that's the case Pebble is making here?
>> 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
> This is an indication that your complaint is not in Apple's behavior, but your regret that the competition sucks and it's not Apple's fault.
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.
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.
> your complaint is not in Apple's behavior, but your regret that the competition sucks and it's not Apple's fault
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 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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
You don't see how you can be a monopoly with nearly 2/3 market share and 2.5x market size of your next-largest competitor? You must not be very imaginative
I have a very capable smartwatch and it's ridiculously bad how hobbled it is on iOS. I'm glad to see this article specifically highlight the issues, and how it's 100% Apple's intention to make non-Apple wearables on iOS terrible.
Don't forget the classic "Oh, that 3rd party app/feature is so popular, I bet we could build a identical/slightly less useful thing ourselves so people don't have to use other things than Apple software ever"
If necessary, you can even retroactively ban the competitor's app from the App Store that you control.
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.
Conveniently, Apple's App Store Review Guidelines also include several rules that restrict apps from duplicating features that the OS already provides.
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...
"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.
Do you think Apple will describe how they’re using this to prevent competition in their guidelines? You’ll need to read third party developers’ accounts for that.
I’m pretty sure this rule is only there to stop the hundreds of “flashlight” apps that used to exist. (Although, they appear to still exist) There isn’t tons of innovation or competition in “flashlight app” other than adding advertisements. There used to be a bunch of them that would only get popular out of necessity. The ones I’m seeing now in the App Store do seem to have non-default behaviors like “strobe light” at least, so they aren’t true clones of native functionality.
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.
So what? Why not let there be flashlight apps if users find them useful? Apple doesn't have to recommend them in the app store and can sort them to the bottom of search results page. But why can't the exist. If people don't want them they will choose not to install them.
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).
And yet Apple has shown many times a willingness to use vague language of their rules to block apps they don't want. Past behavior can't predict future behavior.
Flashlight apps were a 3rd party innovation. Apple didn't originally realize that the camera's light could be used that way. I wonder how many other useful features don't exist today because of Apple/Google's greed prevent a truly free smartphone market.
I've never understood this Apple criticism (scherlocking). Someone built a search for your files, so it's not right for Apple to build a pretty key feature into the OS?
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.
The key criticism is the final step. They don't only duplicate the functionality. They then ban the original implementation from their stores because it can create "customer confusion".
Not explicitly (because that might be too openly anti-competitive even for Apple) but Apple refused to allow f.lux into the App Store, and it had to be sideloaded - and Apple leaned on them to stop offering that.
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.
In Apple nomenclature, a private API is an API that your app is technically allowed to call, but that is subject to change at any moment and has 0 documentation and no backwards compatibility guarantees. If Apps were allowed to rely on those, they could just stop working across minor version upgrades or on new devices.
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.
No, all security-sensitive API surface requires being on the other side of a process boundary (and checks on who is allowed to talk to it). “Signed code” is not a thing given that you can just ship an app that can do anything and have its behavior change at runtime (that’s what an interpreter is!)
While this is true, many, many apps use private APIs. Even apps that don’t need them. One common use case is prevent an app from being debugged or run on certain devices - you can achieve that through private APIs.
Even innocuous apps like a calculator can, and do, use them for that purpose.
Almost every major third party app is using some private API or the other. There is even an internal list that Apple keeps of apps that are allowed to do. It’s quite trivial to bypass the App Store checks (which are quite bad and sometimes even flag legitimate use of system APIs).
> 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.
Not allowing third party apps to adjust screen colors seems like a reasonable security boundary to me. For the most part when you close an app on iOS, it gets closed. It doesnt get to keep changing system settings in the background. Would be awful if in addition to notifications, apps also got to adjust your colors.
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.
For context, as a software developer and Mac OS user who also happens to daily drive a screen reader, I seriously doubt whether you could implement a third-party SR on that platform.
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’s not exactly a new thing, either. Even back in the 80s and 90s, many times Apple either implemented obvious-in-retrospect functionality from popular freeware/shareware themselves or bought up the shareware and rolled it in.
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.
The issue is that they don’t compete on equal footing, because they integrate whatever functionality they adapt with OS features and/or first-party apps in a way that third-party apps can’t. That’s anti-competitive and increases their moat.
I mean it’s also a lot more work to add all the features Pebble would need so it could simply be they don’t think it’s worth it (and it probably isn’t, given all the other broken stuff they need to fix).
The ONLY answer is antitrust action from every major government.
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.
Building and maintaining a functional marketplace (e.g. through common-sense anti-trust enforcement) is about more than just optimizing for a specific outcome...
IMO it makes sense to nationalize things that lend themselves to natural monopolies, or sectors where innovation has mostly dried up on account of maturity, where continued progress is largely driven by tax-funded research grants already. I'm not convinced that "computing" is such an industry, innovation seems dead there because of monopoly. In that case, they should be broken up to drive competition-fueled innovation, with careful supervision to monitor for and punish anti-consumer behavior, abuse of negative externalities, etc.
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.
i think this pov buys too tightly into the idea that national projects arent innovative they are often more innovative than the private sector but it requires buy in and focus from their managers and funding from politicians
The Soviet Union had everything nationalized and it always accountable only to the Politburo. This idea that governments are “accountable” is cute. Government shouldn’t be running businesses.
100% agree that decisive anti-trust action is needed. In addition, many of us can (and do) choose to just not participate (to the best of our abilities) in the nonsense from these companies.
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...
Trouble is that most major governments are democratic, meaning that the governmental powers that be are the very same people (the population at large) who are already not willing to do anything about it. The majority will clearly isn't there at this time (that can change in the future, of course).
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.
I don't think we need any major government intervention.
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.
> 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.
Interoperability is a commons; the market won't protect it on its own, because each individual consumer's best action is to just get an iPhone and an Apple Watch.
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.
I don't, and I won't, but that doesn't really address the points in that post. There is nothing any individual can do about massive corporate cartels controlling entire industries and strangling all potential competition in the cradle, like they said anti-trust enforcement is the only way. But apparently it'll be difficult to garner support for that when people perceive it as an attack on their 'consumer preferences'
Apple and iPhone are a gravitational singularity distorting every single market in the world.
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?
Microsoft of that era is a tiny bug compared to the trillion dollar giants of today.
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.
Apple Silicon could not have existed without the vast amount of capital that a trillion dollar company like Apple could've mustered, TSMC might even be one or two generations behind where it is right now if Apple couldn't afford bankroll the latest generation and temporarily monopolize it, and for that reason alone I'm fine with the state of affairs
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
it's pretty frustrating how "apple people" just don't care that it's apples fault. i routinely hear my wife mutter "i hate google so much!" when a google maps integration is being intentionally hobbled to keep her using apple maps. or when she has trouble managing rcs conversations because somebody in our social world has the gall to be on an android phone.
I am aware that apple blocks certain functionality to maintain a cohesive and secure experience. It is THE reason I buy their products, I want the curation. Otherwise I'd buy an android device.
That's all well and good. Opting into that knowingly is a reasonable decision. Hopefully knowing you've opted into that you aren't then cursing Google when they don't support some functionality blocked by Apple, or when RCS is poorly supported, but instead recognizing this as a trade-off you made opting into the Apple closed garden.
The reason Apple Maps even exists is because Google intentionally crippled their Maps app on iPhone in order to benefit their own OS.
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.
The "closed" approach is way better when it involves guardrails rather than handcuffs. Pixels offer guardrails; they're just as secure as iPhones but offer a lot more freedom to power users. Android is a lot more than just Pixels though and some of the other OEMs don't provide security updates quite as timely, creating a bad reputation
I’m not sure I agree. I’ve seen tech illiterate family members screw up Pixels and Samsung devices in the same way they screwed up Windows systems in the past. Even the most tech illiterate family members have done nothing bad to their iPhones. In fact I know one that was still using an iPhone 7 until last year and it was very functional. Two year old top of the line Samsung phones are crawling after two years. All anecdotal of course.
There are like 10 grandmas in my extended family (in-laws etc), none of them know their Apple ID passwords, none have recovery contacts. They probably forgot because it never asks for that password except when they want to download a free app, cause for some reason that's a highly sensitive thing.
It does work. As I said, I had to go through it with a family member a few months ago. It's hardly Apple's problem if a user forgets their password AND email address.
I don't expect Apple to get someone back into an account they've forgotten everything about, but you shouldn't need to do that just to download a free app. Grandma already knows her passcode, that should be enough.
i had the same problem with this behavior from google as i do from apple. i would be just as critical of google zealots blaming apple for google shortcomings as i am for apple zealots blaming google for apple shortcomings.
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.
RCS on iPhone just sucks though. All I have is anecdotal evidence, but it feels like I only get late or out-of-order delivery from iPhones.
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.
Arguably, that's more to do with the standard and Google's proprietary extensions. The colors thing has been discussed ad nauseum. SMS messages have been green from day one - see https://youtu.be/G8d7E26WLsY?t=1723. If colors were reversed, there'd be the same complaints. If the difference between iMessage and SMS were highlighted any other way, there'd be complaints too.
The standards issue is only relevant to E2EE. It has no bearing on the usability issues here. The E2EE issues should be fixed soon according to Apple. I'd bet a good amount of money the usability issues will remain.
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".
> It's literally impossible for a lot of color-impaired people to see
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.
As someone with strong deuteranopia (I struggle to differentiate shades of green and darker bluey-reds), I am extremely sceptical about that claim too. For what it's worth, I've never had a problem reading the white-on-green bubbles in Messages. I do agree that a contrast closer to WCAG's recommendation would be better (currently 2:1, recommendation is ~4.5:1), but this is a diversion. The point I was making is that no matter what Apple does here, there is visible differentiation, and people will complain about it.
Google provides a client and infrastructure, which they sell to carriers and which has a number of proprietary extensions, including E2EE if the message is Google to Google. If a carrier does not provide Universal Profile, Google provides it. If you send a message using Google Messages, it may default to Google's profile, which is not open and only available to Google Messages users, which is arguably no different to iMessage. Apple provides an RCS client which relies on carrier infrastructure. If there is no compatible profile AIUI, it falls back to MMS or fails.
My personal stance on this is that while I’m open to making iOS, etc more flexible, it needs to be done in a way that cleanly avoids the whole “grandma accidentally installed a pile of browser toolbars yet again” problem. I’m confident I can manage added flexibility myself but there’s a very real need for a truly foolproof, social-engineering-resistant option to point friends and family without such aptitudes toward.
> I am aware that apple blocks certain functionality to maintain a cohesive and secure experience.
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.
That's their justification. I never had security problems on Android, and I actually find Android to be more cohesive. Just a few things where iOS is uncohesive to me: You can customize the keyboard, but it will not work everywhere the same. Apps will send you randomly through hoops to click some permissions things in settings. App settings are sometimes centralized, sometimes in the app. There is no single way to "back" to the previous screen.
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.
perhaps i'm out of date! this may have resolved with the recent increased support of rcs and i maybe haven't heard this complaint lately, it's worth checking into again.
I don't like that iMessage = lock-in, but everyone else needs to make a better standard first. We got cross-platform encrypted covid chat before we got this. RCS has an FBI "do not use" warning on it because there's no E2EE. And the reason people don't want green bubbles is cause they always screw up the group chat.
There are many anti competitive practices that Apple and Microsoft engage in. And a lot of it is not even “preventing” something but just bogging it down so it takes a lot of time and money and starves out anyone who could challenge them.
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.
Because everyone here commenting knows the reason?! This is all speculation by outsiders. Apple isn’t commenting and if they did, outsiders wouldn’t know if it’s the real reason. It could be that Apple lacks the patents, for some of these key features and they are making the best out of a bad situation. It is what it is and we can’t be sure why.
I too have a very capable smartwatch (fitness watch - Garmin Fenix) and it's remarkable how different my experience with messages and actions are relative to the experience of Garmin users with Apple phones.
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!
> 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
> 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 Garmin experience on iOS is noticeably inferior for me.
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?
I can understand someone would want that level of granularity.
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.
I honestly don't think Apple products are a smart choice for tech savvy people anymore if they ever were. You are paying a premium for easy to use, convenient servicing, and the aesthetic.
And this is exactly the problem. Apple presents many of their users with bad choices: either buy an Apple Watch and suffer from its downsides, or switch to Android, and suffer in other ways. Or stick with the iPhone, buy a third-party smartwatch, and suffer from and unnecessarily-crippled user experience.
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.
You couldn't pay me to go back to Android, having used Android from 2009-2020. Apple Watch is fantastic, I'm a little sad that they don't provide better integration capabilities to external devices. I can only assume that's another anti-competitive lawsuit brewing.
Sure it is. Both Apple and Google, through various tactics, have ensured that it's virtually impossible for a third smartphone OS to be successful to anywhere near the level they have been.
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.
I don't think this is true. Apple could drop smart watch support entirely and I still wouldn't use an Android phone. I personally find the user experience infinitely better on iOS than on Android, and Apple would have to drop the ball very bad to get me to switch.
(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)
GGP mentions "user experience" being "infinitely better". I don't think Android being made by an advertising company has much if anything to do with it.
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.
shocker huh? After owning a few iPhones since 2007, I used and developed for Android for years after release in 2010. I despise it. I switched BACK to iPhone and fully embraced the ecosystem years ago (macOS, iOS, ipadOS) and haven't regretted one second of it. I AM an apple fan boy. Why? because i love using my devices and working within this ecosystem a hundred times more than any other options available. The anti-Apple cult is obnoxious. Just don't use them if you don't like them.
I am of course, but at least they have revenues not tied to spying. I'm not a corporate fanboy so all of this stuff disappoints me, just not going to make the perfect the enemy of the good
I don't like that it's made by an advertising company, like the other commenter said. But more than that it's that it's wildly unpolished and inconsistent.
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.
Same. I actually like that Apple locks down everything to their own devices, in general, because I believe (from my limited knowledge; I am no insider) it's more secure. Perhaps not, but I trust Apple to release products that are fairly secure, and update them for several years. Whereas with Android, I'd have to trust the phone manufacturer, Google (ewww), and all of the companies that have bloatware installed by default. I do wish there were more 3rd party integrations for those who want them (without sacrificing security), but as for me I am perfectly happy giving Apple my money to get good hardware and decent software that works together well (way better integration than anything in the Android/Linux/Windows world).
Similarly if Apple opened up every API and allowed every smart watch to do whatever it wanted, I'd still prefer an Apple Watch. I tried using a Garmin and "not being able to send an sms" isn't even on the list of things I disliked about it. Ugly clunky interface, pogo pin charging, a companion app that at times wouldn't look out of place on a Windows CE smartphone circa 2006, etc.
No, because it's much lower friction to "just" give up and buy an Apple Watch (or just do without), even if you don't like it and think that the features or design a third-party watch are better for you. Or at least could be better, if not for Apple's anti-competitive practices.
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.
Isn't this ignoring the lock-in factor? Leaving Apple is probably more than just switching a single piece of hardware for many users. The entire Apple ecosystem encourages "buying in".
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.
Another company that would like Apple to not expose functionality to their first-party ecosystem and refuse to expose it to third parties even with user consent.
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.
Surprised there are professional developers who seem to be clueless about the vast difference in the cost of developing 3p API versus internal only functions. The basic difference between public and private has been captured in language design for decades now.
I'm well aware of the cost difference, but the cost of internal-only functions is potentially measured in antitrust actions.
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.
Yeah it does seem like antitrust is the wedge employed by 3rd parties who would like Apple to do free R&D for them, most ironically by Spotify which holds are arguable monopoly on music streaming.
I’m glad that antitrust enabled a rich ecosystem of Microsoft Office alternatives and competitors.
Apple certainly doesn't have to do free R&D for third parties. They could, instead, not ship features that work exclusively with other Apple products. Or, hey, there's also the other valid option of "don't be the exclusive gatekeeper of the platform", they're welcome to take that one too.
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.
You are at least an honest critic here in that you admit you'd rather Apple not build great features for its own customers if that means some hypothetical future company isn't allowed to hypothetically build its own version if Apple made some or all of its proprietary R&D available for free to this hypothetical competitor.
Most people pretend that all that effort is free and trivial to expose as API.
Now we're just playing semantic games. There's a big difference between the level of effort that goes into internal API and public API, and clearly the ask here is Apple undertake that effort now and forevermore to support a public API for Pebble to use for free. You can map that distinction pretty easily onto my earlier comments without changing my argument at all.
It’s not API. That’s the whole complaint of the post. Just because it’s implemented internally does not mean it’s ready for framework support. Have you ever built an API before?
iOS wearable integrations are bad, but somehow Meta Ray-Bans are very good. Voice assist to start a call, send a text, read a notification, etc. Did Meta get special access to do this?
> 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.
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?
It might be because Meta iOS app is handling some of that handoff and its not possible to do these action purely via the BT api? It seems like in the end they recognize if that had an iOS app they could accomplish some of their wishlist items. However, there are other valid critiques here.
Seems to be correct, according to [0] the user needs to link the Meta View app with WhatsApp, not sure if the link is then made on the cloud or on the local device...:
"Use the Meta View app to connect Ray-Ban Stories and Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses to WhatsApp on your phone."
That sounds like FB Messenger and WhatsApp. I'm guessing they do some server side workaround that wouldn't work for regular text messages or Apple-y messages.
We have seen competitors (big, well-known apps) do things on iOS that most definitely are not possible with public APIs. Either Apple willingfully provides access to these APIs to a select few companies, or they don't care that they reverse-engineer private APIs and then use them. If it's the latter, the competitor app was probably too big to be banned from the app store for this.
Apple was unwilling to comment on the situation when we asked them.
Often this is via special entitlements [0]. Published APIs, which you're only allowed to use if Apple approve your request.
Apple typically don't publish the criteria for when they approve entitlements, so it's almost impossible to get approved. You need to be a big company with contacts inside Apple.
Meta, Google etc. will all have negotiated a bunch of these entitlements for their own apps. But smaller companies are totally shut out.
I've still had some settings thrashing with my raybans - sometimes they will refuse to read messages and ask me over and over to enable a setting, which is already enabled. Seems more likely to be an Apple issue than Meta given it has roughly coincided with iOS upgrades.
For voice integration, you can just provide a bluetooth microphone on you device and have it access Siri. Garmin have tried the same strategy on some of their watches.
What you can't do is reply to a text without using voice, which is what I'd like.
>For voice integration, you can just provide a bluetooth microphone on you device and have it access Siri. Garmin have tried the same strategy on some of their watches.
If your watch does not support Bluetooth Classic with the headset profile then you can't pretend to be a mic. So watches with Bluetooth LE only can not utilize Siri.
Some 6 years ago I bought new bluetooth headphones.
Every time I'd put them on, my macbook would open apple music (I didn't even know it was installed). Every time. No way to disable it, I really tried. Stopped shy of doing some kernel stuff.
Sold that laptop, and have never touched anything apple since. Probably never will. The hardware's good, everything else is an embarrassing mess.
Not only every time they connect, but every time they are paused or stopped too. My car has this problem. It was not possible to pause the music, it would always immediately restart play.
It's because your headphones were sending a Bluetooth "Play" command on connect (my Honda Odyssey does this as well). For anyone else with this problem, you can override this silly default in macOS using Privacy & Security > Bluetooth, adding Music, then turning off Bluetooth access for Music.
That is maybe questionable behaviour from the headphones. But the worse problem is that there is no way to change what media player is used. I don't use Apple Music, have no songs in it and no subscription. But it opens that rather than the player I do use.
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.
Remembering the uproar when Apple said 3rd party apps would have to be web apps, but didn't ship the features needed to write good web apps on the first iPhone? The term PWA wasn't coined until 8 years later, and Apple has long been accused of hobbling its web stack to incite people to ship on the App Store and pay their 30% tithing.
The term PWA may not have been coined until 2015, but you could definitely save a webpage to your home screen on i(Pad)OS at least as early as 2010. Granted, it was pretty limited, but you could put an icon on your screen, have it open a web view that was somewhat separate from Safari, store data with localstorage, and generally look and feel kinda mostly like a native app.
I guess this is why their market share grows and grows, because the product is terrible and the competition is amazing.
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?
One of the many reasons I have been exiting out of the Apple ecosystem.
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”)
Some of the things mentioned in the post seem to work just fine with Garmin watches. Maybe because Garmin is just bigger they have the resources to implement some of the things (like third party devs publishing various watch apps and faces that are in the Garmin store). Same with notifications, yes, you can't do actions from notifications, but I have notifications "hidden" or whatever that feature is if the phone is locked and they show up just fine on my Forerunner.
Replying to text messages on Garmin watches doesn't work with iPhones. It works fine with Android. But Apple has restricted that messaging functionality to only their own watch in a monopolistic and consumer hostile move.
The notification feature that I miss most from Android+Garmin on iOS+Garmin is the ability filter what apps notifications can go to my watch. Its apparently possible, as Coros seems to have done it.
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).
> 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
OP said “ cannot do A or B”. I demonstrated how to do B, proving the original statement to be a lie. The fact that you still cannot do A irrelevant. Hyperbole has no place in technical discourse.
>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.
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.
I am saying folks who use Linux do not know how to utilize their time well. It’s tongue in cheek at the commentary to the GP but hope that makes more sense to you.
People say this about Linux but it’s not been my experience. Granted I’m 10 years deep now, but everything just works always and is exactly how I like it. Even basic things like menus changing doesn’t happen on Debian. I’m good to go.
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.
Stop taking things so seriously and understand my comment was playful as I already indicated. It was more of a jab at usage of lazy but not in critical way.
Don’t be so critical over a tongue in cheek comment and don’t be so defensive over your choice of inferior products.
It happens that lots of people who use Linux like to mess around with things, and, from a certain perspective, that's a waste of time. (But can be enjoyable.)
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.)
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.
It’s not a fantasy, we were there at some point and we deliberately moved from it.
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.
What people aren't generally used to doing is installing OSes. Any OS. Using OSes... Windows 11 is far more complicated, finicky than plenty of Linux installs. (People get caught up in the "you're not holding it right" for Windows/Mac issues.)
It doesn't matter if it's "good enough". These are our systems, they're the only things that are truly ours. The alternative is to become serfs in a trillion dollar corporation's digital fiefdom.
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.
> 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”.
The average Joe also faces pain points on Windows.
If there's a case to make on Apple hindering a competitive landscape, then it would possibly be a case of violation of the European Union's DMA (Digital Markets Act), as Apple is not allowed to favor their own services over those of competitors in visibility, functionality, or integration within iOS.
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...
Apple has also shown its not shy about geofencing the remedies to only help people physically located in the EU's jurisdiction, with a billing address to match.
With Spotify app, some issues seem to be due to Spotify themselves. For example, even when you explicitly download music to your watch, the app needs network connection to start playing. This seems to be explicit design decision on Spotify's part.
Pennywise pound foolish and harming UX at the same time. They could just require that Spotify logs the plays and uploads them on the next connection. Resulting in more plays and more money. But instead they block it for the 0.1% of the time that the watch is lost, destroyed or reinstalled before that sync happens.
> Pennywise pound foolish and harming UX at the same time. They could just require that Spotify logs the plays and uploads them on the next connection. Resulting in more plays and more money. But instead they block it for the 0.1% of the time that the watch is lost, destroyed or reinstalled before that sync happens.
Why are you just blindly accepting their vapid evidenceless postulation lol
The (unfortunate!) hack here is to disable the BT connection on your phone, works 90% of the time.
Also when downloading songs, its better to disable BT on the phone, otherwise the songs download through BT instead of through the much faster Wifi connection. This is clearly an Apple impendiment here, crippling a feature that should work without these sort of hacks.
> "Apple’s “Watch Policy” annoys me, but not enough to switch to Android. I hope Apple will be forced to improve their compatibility with other watches."
The conundrum of "[xyz] annoys me, but not enough to [do anything about it], yet I hope [Company] will be forced to improve [xyz]"
So where is that 'force' expected to come from...?
If there are effectively two choices and both of them do things you don’t like, “it’s your fault for not switching to the other one” isn’t a very useful argument
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...
Unless regulation is the problem[1], you need the will of the people[2] to see regulation come into force. But if the people had the will, they could just see it through already. No need for regulation.
[1] Which it is in the case of computing. Intellectual property law makes direct competition against the law.
There are a lot of contexts floating around, but you are meaning something like how would the people attain a state where they can buy something almost exactly like the iPhone, but with less restrictions or perhaps some different features, without regulation?
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 that if the people had the will they would see it through assumes efficient markets with negligible startup costs and informed and rational consumers, which is not the way the real world works.
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?
> The idea that if the people had the will they would see it through assumes efficient markets with negligible startup costs and informed and rational consumers, which is not the way the real world works.
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.
The issue is, suppose you want a phone with A, B, C, D and E.
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 are you supposed to do? Reward the company providing even less of what you want?
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.
The question is, why is it so infeasible to enter the market?
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.
> The question is, why is it so infeasible to enter the market?
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.
> 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 a few years ago.
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.
> But when you have to do all of those things and more?
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.
> 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.
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.
> But holy shit you’ve gotta develop everything from the airframe to the turbines to the cockpit and landing gear simultaneously.
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.
Eric did exactly what you suggest, and found out he can't really build it without permission from the manufacturer. So no, you can't just pull up the pants.
You'd only need permission if regulation required it, and we already excepted where regulation is what is getting in the way. So, no, you can pull up your pants just fine.
"Regulation" is a dirty word because most regulations are written by captured regulators. The last thing you want is new rules that permanently entrench the incumbent duopoly while pretending that you can tame Godzilla to keep as a pet if only the right chains are used.
You need rules that restore actual competition. Accept no substitute.
Rules that restore competition are a specific subset of regulations. Undifferentiated "more regulations" not only don't inherently restore competition, they generally do the opposite by increasing barriers to entry and compliance costs for smaller entities, so asking for regulations without specifying which ones is like saying we should solve a problem by using weapons. It's not saying something specific enough to know whether you should agree with it in a given case and in the absence of more details the heuristic for how to answer that question is no.
Almost funny to observe how this comment floats between 1 and 0 points every few hours.
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.
You can switch to a Linux phone running Mobian today. You can barely use it as your daily driver, but that’s what I do. Be the change you want to see in the world.
> So where is that 'force' expected to come from...?
On the margin, it probably does annoy some people enough to do something about it. And even though Apple's policy on this isn't enough to move me, if you combine it with my other annoyances about Apple products, eventually the sum will be enough.
And we vocalize stuff like this because switching does have a cost that I'd rather not pay, so hopefully people who can make a change at Apple will see the discontent and fix it so that I don't have to pay the switching cost.
Because everyone is on a spectrum. [xyz] wasn't the straw to break this user's back, but it will be the tipping point for some number of users. [xyz] is also moving this user closer to the edge, so when Apple does [abc] the sum of both is now enough to move this user.
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.
I think the problem is that nobody makes a smart watch as good as the Apple Watch, so people already in the ecosystem have no real reason to care that it's their only option. There's a reason Linus Sebastian has been wearing Apple Watches for years despite being a self-proclaimed Android fanboy.
This is only getting attention now because these new Pebble devices are offering an Apple Watch alternative people actually want.
I'm saying that even without those restrictions, the existing stable of Android Wear devices would still be less appealing than an Apple Watch. There's a reason they aren't even all that popular with actual Android users where those restrictions don't exist.
There's very little an individual can sensibly do. You can't pick and choose every feature you want; you're given bundles of features and you have to pick which bundle you like best. This sort of bundling is deliberate anti-competitive behaviour, which the EU and other countries have recently taken steps to crack down on. So there is hope that apple will be reigned in here.
Anti-trust authorities. Non US based government authorities (e.g. in the EU). Etc. The current trade wars might impact Apple the other large Silicon Valley companies pretty soon. Think stricter rules, bigger fines, more restrictions outside the US.
When it comes to Apple, there probably is quite a bit of low hanging fruit:
- Allowing 3rd party interpreters, browsers engines, etc. on IOS. The OS has sandboxing, there should be no security argument here. Android can manage this, so why not Apple?
- Arbitrary app store restrictions and predatory fees on transactions. Apple is getting rich by essentially using mafia style schemes here. Nice App you have there. It would be a shame it got banned. Better implement X, drop feature Y, or else ... Oh and by the way, you need to pay us 30% on every transaction in your app and you are not allowed to link to payment options outside your app.
- Repairability issues. Apple products continue to score low here. And Apple makes quite a bit of money charging 3-4x component cost for parts and upgrades.
The whole iOS extension mechanism should be illegal. It's such a clear advantage to apple's own apps, i don't understand how nobody has every sued Apple about it.
It's equally disingenuous to compare them to "general purpose computers" too, in that case. A primary computing device doesn't have to be a "general purpose computer".
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.
I read Darwin recently and he talks about how weak insects will use deception methods to compensate for their lack of strength and it reminded me of Apple.
They arent the best, they are never 1st, they are 2nd or third or beyond.
Instead they found niches in marketing. Read the word "Security" or "Privacy" in white and black text in their commercials, no actual claims on either. Just the words. They have stylish products with their celebrities, dancing people, and blue bubbles. None add to the strength to the product. In the LLM world, they've tricked people into thinking 'unified RAM' and integrated video cards are equivalent to an Nvidia GPU.
Specifically on topic, iPhones seemed to always under perform in features. This is yet another example.
Their track record makes it obvious, but most consumers won't notice. That is why the deception works. I used to be an Android Zealot who preached the immorality of Apple, but I genuinely stopped caring that other people were making mistakes and Apple was exploiting them. If anything, I take notes personally how to be more like Apple, save my strength and get positive outcomes.
I think, we fundamentally lack a mechanism to enforce secure / privacy aware APIs without resorting to trusted inner-circle type of things. I am already not comfortable with Apple picking winners (such as giving Zoom special entitlement but not the VOIP apps you want to distribute by your own). Apple trusting their own apps more than other apps is another symptom of this and it is not helping their anti-trust situation even if it is with good-will.
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).
Quicktime Player.app gets an entitlement called `com.apple.private.tcc.allow`, giving it unprompted access to the Camera, Microphone, and Screen Capture.
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?
Replace MDM administrator with ‘malware author’ or ‘spy software’ to get your answer. There is functionally no difference between a regular company doing MDM wanting to bypass camera permission prompts and a hacker who has tricked/forced the user into enrolling into MDM.
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.
It's not very trivial to manage an Apple device and Apple would shut down those ABM tenants real quick. Not to mention, supervision requires enrollment pre-setup, which is really difficult.
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.
MDM is not easy but you can enroll devices after the fact, pre-enrollment isn’t the only option. But yes, it’s a PITA to deal with even at the best of times.
Ahh, maybe I’m mistaken or maybe iOS works differently. I believe you can enroll it in MDM and then you have 30 or 60 days to kick it out at any time and then it becomes fully locked in. Or perhaps I have my terminology wrong. I only scratch the surface of MDM at my company.
This is more to do with ABM - you can add a device to ABM that wasn’t put there by a reseller/vendor/Apple. This also enrols the device, and removing the enrolment in the first 30 days also removes it from ABM again.
After the 30-day period, the enrolment profile cannot be removed on the device-side. This workflow applies for both iOS and macOS.
On macOS the enrolment is supervised either way. You can also get a supervised enrolment on an iOS device that isn’t in any ABM instance - there is more than one path to supervision.
I mean the reason is because Apple, the people who made the security boundary, and Apple the people who made Quicktime are the same people.
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.
> Apple knows exactly how Quicktime behaves, that it doesn't act maliciously, and can't be updated to do so.
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".
I'm sure that could happen, but it's not really any different than exploiting some other part of the system. You make a fine case that the nature of this code means it will likely be under less security scrutiny than such an entitlement warrants but that's Apple's problem now.
> 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.
Remember when people realized that Apple apps were bypassing application-level firewalls like LittleSnitch?
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".
Think about why they ask for access in the first place - it's because camera access or screen access might be unexpected for the app you've just started. Or maybe you don't trust the app with your camera (looking at you, Instagram).
QuickTime Player is already on your Mac and you already know what it does when you launch it.
I guess that's fair, because the name says Player. But still, the way to not use those features is to not use those features. Unlike a third party app you don't need to worry about it trying to read your screen if you haven't explicitly started a screen recording. If you can't trust Apple to do that then you can't trust Apple to block third party apps from recording, either.
Security boundaries are for more than intentionally bad apps, but things like bugs causing code execution or other ways of abusing their privileged position.
An app decoding complex untrusted media files from the internet? It should have the absolute minimum permissions.
That's not the problem Apple was trying to solve here.
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.
There are millions of ways you implicitly trust Apple software to not violate your trust when you use their products. The whole point is Apple can gauge whether it is appropriately stewarding that trust in first party code much better than it can with third party code.
> 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.
If you followed the Apple Security scene for a bit, you'll notice that a lot of exploits make use of special permissions granted to Apples own apps and services. If you find a way to run your code in Quicktime Player, or to control Quicktime Player, you can circumvent the privacy dialog.
Do you trust Quicktime Player to be free of exploitable bugs or behaviors?
> 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.
Because to activate apple's device (not yours), you had to read 1000+ pages of terms and conditions (did you?) and they told you this somewhere in there.
It’s likely a priority issue. They have limited software resources but have so many products to support and develop, they will like any company weight what fits their future roadmap and strategy. Saying they purposely hobble watch devs isn’t really true
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 407 ms ] threadThe 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
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.
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.
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...
"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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
Even innocuous apps like a calculator can, and do, use them for that purpose.
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.
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.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/16/22676706/apple-watch-swip...
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.
I enjoy apple devices but hate the walled garden.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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
So major government intervention.
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?
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.)
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.
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 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.
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...
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.
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.
The law doesn't care why they choose to do it. The result of the decision is what constitutes illegal monopoly behavior.
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.
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.
https://www.hrgrapevine.com/us/content/article/2024-08-29-te...
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.
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.
(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)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
"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...
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.
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...>
And then the same in the other direction.
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.
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?
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.
https://github.com/tombonez/noTunes
this will prevent itunes/apple music from opening
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?
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”)
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).
> 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
Hardly useable for a message reply.
>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.
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.
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.
Don’t be so critical over a tongue in cheek comment and don’t be so defensive over your choice of inferior products.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
You can just say that you don't have enough time or spoons to do free tech support.
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...
see this discussion, for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/AppleWatch/comments/1h6qmrw/spotify...
And people wonder why piracy happens.
Why are you just blindly accepting their vapid evidenceless postulation lol
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.
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...?
When a market is stuck in a local maximum, an external force would be beneficial to push it out of it.
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...
[1] Which it is in the case of computing. Intellectual property law makes direct competition against the law.
[2] Assuming a democracy.
How does this work in the context of this discussion?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HarmonyOS_NEXT
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.
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.
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.
But yeah...not a popular opinion here, I know...
You need rules that restore actual competition. Accept no substitute.
> You need rules that restore actual competition
What is the difference between the two?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
And "giving people choice" won't work neither because people will just tap whatever checkbox you give them (the internet should never forget that Facebook SDK just forces to accept "The App is Tracking You" notification and most users tapped yes).
An MDM administrator, managing a computer or device owned by an organization, cannot grant those permissions to anything without user consent. For good reason!
So why the *fuck* does Apple think they're entitled to?
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.
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.
After the 30-day period, the enrolment profile cannot be removed on the device-side. This workflow applies for both iOS and macOS.
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.
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.
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".
QuickTime Player is already on your Mac and you already know what it does when you launch it.
An app decoding complex untrusted media files from the internet? It should have the absolute minimum permissions.
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.
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.
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.
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.