So this tap to pair won’t work in the US? The side loading stuff I can understand to restrict to the EU, but this just seems like a nice feature for everyone
Not only isn’t this or any other of the DMA features accessible in the USA, but Norway which is a member of the EEC and which therefore both have to and is in the process of ratifying the DMA. Don’t get this either.
That Apple is so petty that it blocks on legal technicalities like that, when everyone knows it is just a matter of time. Really sours me on the whole company.
I live in the EU and now traveling my family outside the EU. Today I’ve tried updating AltStore but it won’t let me. Even VPNing to my home won’t do it.
So until there will be more incentive to make it globally, the UX is intentionally crippled not only by making the minimal viable but also by region locking.
Imagine pairing headphones working great in EU and then you’re traveling somewhere and it’s broken.
Hopefully third-party devices will actually implement what is necessary to take advantage of it. Being limited to the EU market, it’s not clear if it will happen much.
Three months ago a commenter here on HN claimed to me that this will be bad for Apple users:
> There is simply no good way to make the API public while maintaining the performance and quality expectations that Apple consumers have. If the third party device doesn’t work people will blame Apple even though it’s not their fault.
And, competition probably can’t build for it anyway:
> It’s impossible to build Apple Silicon level of quality in power to watt performance or realtime audio apps over public APIs.
And:
> […] Apple has to sabotage their own devices performance and security to let other people use it. The EU has no business in this.
Well, I look forward to next year when we’ll have the receipts and see!
Wow, it's almost as if regulations were necessary to curtail the worst excesses of capitalism and steer it towards user interest instead of maximal exploitation...
Currently, on the AirPods side and not iOS side like the article covers, Apple breaks Bluetooth feature parity with other devices by not sticking to the Bluetooth spec with AirPods themselves.
For example, you need to root and patch your Bluetooth stack on your phone if you want to use all of your AirPods features on Android, and not because Android is doing something wrong, it's because the Android Bluetooth stack actually sticks to the spec and AirPods don't.
And even when you do that, you can't do native AAC streaming like you can with iOS/macOS. Even if you're listening to AAC encoded audio, it'll be transcoded again as 256kbps AAC over Bluetooth.
Even no name earbuds on Amazon manage to not break Bluetooth and can offer cross platform high quality audio over Bluetooth.
> For example, you need to root and patch your Bluetooth stack on your phone if you want to use all of your AirPods features on Android, and not because Android is doing something wrong, it's because the Android Bluetooth stack actually sticks to the spec and AirPods don't.
It’s a mix of bad Bluetooth implementations still on the Android side, and Apple extensions to cram audio features into the BLE envelope.
> And even when you do that, you can't do native AAC streaming like you can with iOS/macOS. Even if you're listening to AAC encoded audio, it'll be transcoded again as 256kbps AAC over Bluetooth.
How would this be Apple’s fault if the OS audio stack can’t do direct AAC streaming? Or are you saying the headphones themselves decode, re-encode and then re-decode the AAC?
> How would this be Apple’s fault if the OS audio stack can’t do direct AAC streaming? Or are you saying the headphones themselves decode, re-encode and then re-decode the AAC?
There are multiple Bluetooth standards for lossless audio that work across platforms. Instead of implementing those features, Apple uses a proprietary protocol to half-ass it only for the case of AAC. Even in that case, it requires a proprietary Bluetooth stack to work. Without that proprietary stack, the Airpods default to low quality transcoding of audio streams at 256kbps, and don't offer true high quality or lossless audio playback. So even in the one case where Airpods offer some semblance of lossless playback, it's non-standard and applicable to AAC only.
Cross platform high quality and lossless audio, multipoint pairing, etc solved problems and features that even $20 white label earbuds on Amazon are able to implement.
I have no doubt that Gruber will find reasons why the EU is bad and regulation is bad. At this point it's rather amusing how Daring Fireball (and many other American media) rants against regulation, and in another post complains about how companies exploit users.
Regulation is unfortunately necessary: the market isn't as magical as we would like it to be and competition is not a magic wand that makes everything good for users. Companies either become dominant, or universally screw over their users. Users either have no choice, do not understand the choices, or simply don't care.
I am glad the EU tries to do something. They aren't always right, but they should be trying. As a reminder, one of the biggest success stories of EU regulation: cheap cellular roaming within the EU. It used to be horribly expensive (like it is in the US), but the EU (specifically, Margrethe Vestager) regulated this and miracle of miracles, we can now move across the EU and not worry about horrendous cell phone bills.
There is this idea that regulations are unnatural and no regulations are natural. But the environment where in Apple can operate and make profit is completely artificial. We could go really deep into the origins of nation states, but there is also a practical example like IP law. Is it natural that no one is allowed to copy a iPhone one-to-one? Imagine our ancestors weren’t allowed to copy bow and arrows.
Recently bought an apple watch for my mom and got it set up with her iphone. Almost instantly she notices that she cant accept WhatsApp calls on her watch, and after looking into it I found out that it was another one of those apple things where they assume youre obviously using facetime so that functionality isnt available for any other app. For context, in europe Whatsapp is the dominating messaging app and alot of people use it for calling as well as messaging. The apple watch is, as far as I can tell, a simple Bluetooth wearable with a speaker and a microphone, so the only reason its like this is that apple has a concept of how the device is "supposed" to be used and only lets you use it that way. After that experience I fully support all the regulations the EU is putting on apple to open up.
WhatsApp did not have a dedicated Watch app until 1 or 2 months ago – it was not even possible to respond to WhatsApp messages on the Watch, only seeing the mirrored notifications was possible.
You can blame Apple for other things if that is the intention, but this particular one was a decision made by Meta and by Meta only.
Write to your regulator and make a complaint that Meta is keeping the WhatsApp stage gate.
Got a MacBook for work recently, paired it to my AirPods I had for months, and it was funny noticing you could enable FindMy for them from the settings but they wouldn't show up in my devices on the map. Indeed, for this you need to pair with an iPhone or iPad. However it did enable the beacon on the airpods as the next day AirGuard notified a device was following me. And since, I can't disable it, the switch in the settings doesn't disable the beacon AirGuard still detects them. Even within their ecosystem they'll punish you for not being fully "part of the familly".
Are we learning the wrong lessons? Integrated always works better than modular components. Here, Apple is being asked to enable their versions of software for third party devices, which do not have the same hardware assumptions as Apple did. (Apple will not release the exact hardware spec for airpods anyway). This means the newer version will be designed modularly, with some tradeoffs to enable the "same" kind of access to third party. Then there is a caveat that it there is even a bit of experience change from 1st party to third party access, it will be complained about and investigated. so, the way fwd is designing with third party in mind, and that almost always leads to bloat and substandard experience for end user.
Probably better would have been just simpler access, even if not the integrated experience like. But that would lead to complains from third party manufacturers.
The components are modular under the hood, they have to be. Apple just doesn't let you take advantage of it.
iOS has a daemon that reads your notifications and ships them to Apple Watch. They have a daemon that scans for AirPods and gives you UI to pair them. But you as an app developer cannot do any of those things. There was no public API for notification stream access, scanning for specific Bluetooth devices, floating UI widgets, or even just persistent daemons. All of those capabilities more or less exist on Android, which is why multiple smartwatch ecosystems have been built on top of it while iOS only supports the first-party option.
Back in the 2000s, when Apple was just getting into mobile devices, the app development landscape was far less bleak. iTunes on Windows could happily index your entire music and video collection and sync it to an iPod and there was nothing Microsoft could do to stop them. Everything is just finding the appropriate file and connecting to the appropriate USB device to transfer it. And that's more or less how things still work today, except now on smartphones all of that is put into isolated containers and walled off behind private APIs.
I disagree with the premise. For me, "works better" means that I can swap out one of the devices in my fleet with a different brand and still have a functioning setup.
But even ignoring that, I think your claim can be true while forcing Apple to be compatible is still the right thing to do, because optimizing for personal convenience and user experience only is not the best outcome if it comes at the expense of market failure due to vendor lock-in.
Waiting to read the news that this unblocks all functionalities in the re-pebble so I could finally purchase one that fully works with iPhones. Way to go EU!
Third-party accessories like smart watches will be able to receive notifications from the iPhone
This seems incorrect, or at least misleading. I have always (since I switched to iPhone in 2020) been receive notifications on my Garmin Fenix watch. In fact, the only problem I have with notifications is that I have no ability to blacklist apps from notifying on my watch, and its all or nothing. This is a huge downgrade from Android, and I wish whomever is responsible could fix that.. That's probably my biggest annoyance with my iphone.
Apple removed the headphone jack to sell AirPods. This was always one of the dirty little details: You could buy non-Apple BT headphones, but they weren't able to work the same way.
I really wonder what the technical detail is that makes it so much harder for this feature to work when your phone is outside the EU, does anyone know?
Something like 5% of the time when I pair my airpods to my apple wathc to go for a run, only one of them pairs. So, if I've actually started running, I then have to circle back to get the headphones case, unpair them, stick them back in the case and hope it then works after i close the lid for a minute.
I don't know much about this, but does "proximity pairing" use some open standard API that's part of the bluetooth spec? Are there any examples of other devices using something like this?
Part of the appeal of Airpods is how seamless they are to pair and share between devices. The UX of bluetooth headphones pairing and device switching before Airpods came along seemed atrocious.
Is this a case of Apple arbitrarily locking out third parties, or is a case of Apple doing the work to get something to work nicely and now being forced to give competition access?
40 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 54.8 ms ] threadThat Apple is so petty that it blocks on legal technicalities like that, when everyone knows it is just a matter of time. Really sours me on the whole company.
So until there will be more incentive to make it globally, the UX is intentionally crippled not only by making the minimal viable but also by region locking.
Imagine pairing headphones working great in EU and then you’re traveling somewhere and it’s broken.
> There is simply no good way to make the API public while maintaining the performance and quality expectations that Apple consumers have. If the third party device doesn’t work people will blame Apple even though it’s not their fault.
And, competition probably can’t build for it anyway:
> It’s impossible to build Apple Silicon level of quality in power to watt performance or realtime audio apps over public APIs.
And:
> […] Apple has to sabotage their own devices performance and security to let other people use it. The EU has no business in this.
Well, I look forward to next year when we’ll have the receipts and see!
Previously, this was available on Android but not iOS as Apple didn’t expose the APIs for watches other than their own.
Will that mean we’ll see some last step assembly move into the EU, or does it only require legal presence?
For example, you need to root and patch your Bluetooth stack on your phone if you want to use all of your AirPods features on Android, and not because Android is doing something wrong, it's because the Android Bluetooth stack actually sticks to the spec and AirPods don't.
And even when you do that, you can't do native AAC streaming like you can with iOS/macOS. Even if you're listening to AAC encoded audio, it'll be transcoded again as 256kbps AAC over Bluetooth.
Even no name earbuds on Amazon manage to not break Bluetooth and can offer cross platform high quality audio over Bluetooth.
It’s a mix of bad Bluetooth implementations still on the Android side, and Apple extensions to cram audio features into the BLE envelope.
> And even when you do that, you can't do native AAC streaming like you can with iOS/macOS. Even if you're listening to AAC encoded audio, it'll be transcoded again as 256kbps AAC over Bluetooth.
How would this be Apple’s fault if the OS audio stack can’t do direct AAC streaming? Or are you saying the headphones themselves decode, re-encode and then re-decode the AAC?
There are multiple Bluetooth standards for lossless audio that work across platforms. Instead of implementing those features, Apple uses a proprietary protocol to half-ass it only for the case of AAC. Even in that case, it requires a proprietary Bluetooth stack to work. Without that proprietary stack, the Airpods default to low quality transcoding of audio streams at 256kbps, and don't offer true high quality or lossless audio playback. So even in the one case where Airpods offer some semblance of lossless playback, it's non-standard and applicable to AAC only.
Cross platform high quality and lossless audio, multipoint pairing, etc solved problems and features that even $20 white label earbuds on Amazon are able to implement.
Regulation is unfortunately necessary: the market isn't as magical as we would like it to be and competition is not a magic wand that makes everything good for users. Companies either become dominant, or universally screw over their users. Users either have no choice, do not understand the choices, or simply don't care.
I am glad the EU tries to do something. They aren't always right, but they should be trying. As a reminder, one of the biggest success stories of EU regulation: cheap cellular roaming within the EU. It used to be horribly expensive (like it is in the US), but the EU (specifically, Margrethe Vestager) regulated this and miracle of miracles, we can now move across the EU and not worry about horrendous cell phone bills.
Unless you mean ol' Hans Gruber. He is quite the villain.
You can blame Apple for other things if that is the intention, but this particular one was a decision made by Meta and by Meta only.
Write to your regulator and make a complaint that Meta is keeping the WhatsApp stage gate.
Probably better would have been just simpler access, even if not the integrated experience like. But that would lead to complains from third party manufacturers.
iOS has a daemon that reads your notifications and ships them to Apple Watch. They have a daemon that scans for AirPods and gives you UI to pair them. But you as an app developer cannot do any of those things. There was no public API for notification stream access, scanning for specific Bluetooth devices, floating UI widgets, or even just persistent daemons. All of those capabilities more or less exist on Android, which is why multiple smartwatch ecosystems have been built on top of it while iOS only supports the first-party option.
Back in the 2000s, when Apple was just getting into mobile devices, the app development landscape was far less bleak. iTunes on Windows could happily index your entire music and video collection and sync it to an iPod and there was nothing Microsoft could do to stop them. Everything is just finding the appropriate file and connecting to the appropriate USB device to transfer it. And that's more or less how things still work today, except now on smartphones all of that is put into isolated containers and walled off behind private APIs.
But even ignoring that, I think your claim can be true while forcing Apple to be compatible is still the right thing to do, because optimizing for personal convenience and user experience only is not the best outcome if it comes at the expense of market failure due to vendor lock-in.
This seems incorrect, or at least misleading. I have always (since I switched to iPhone in 2020) been receive notifications on my Garmin Fenix watch. In fact, the only problem I have with notifications is that I have no ability to blacklist apps from notifying on my watch, and its all or nothing. This is a huge downgrade from Android, and I wish whomever is responsible could fix that.. That's probably my biggest annoyance with my iphone.
Anyone have a solution for this?
Part of the appeal of Airpods is how seamless they are to pair and share between devices. The UX of bluetooth headphones pairing and device switching before Airpods came along seemed atrocious.
Is this a case of Apple arbitrarily locking out third parties, or is a case of Apple doing the work to get something to work nicely and now being forced to give competition access?