I do not believe average smartwatch users understand what they’d be doing if they got this. I do not believe vendors integrating with such a thing can do it safely, or even that all vendors integrating are good actors.
One reason iMessage is less of a total cesspit than SMS is that the ecosystem is closed, and makes automation difficult. It used to be impossible nearly, and in that era we had almost no iMessage spam. Now it’s difficult, and we have moderate iMessage spam. But adding hooks to make this automation easy, and worse, leave the trust environment as a feature is just wrong.
Is it? My iPhone replicates messages to my mac from where a process can extract that data, it can capture the screen etc. I can use a mac today to set up a relay that would then send those messages to a smart watch if one would do that.
Step 2: Have the iPhone pop up saying "do you want <Apple watch> to be able to send messages?" and don't just assume "yes"
Both steps would improve security, even if they harm Apple's profits.
Anyone can already screenshot iMessages and move them out of the "security boundary"... which btw doesn't exist much, as if you have any Mac connected to your iCloud account then those messages are being synced to an SQLite DB any process running under your user can access.
I don't think that's the main reason. iMessage is available on macOS, so by definition isn't that tightly locked down. Anyone can automate/script the desktop app to try and fire off as many messages as you like.
But of course that won't really work because Apple has security algorithms in the network that detect unusual behaviour. Did that user/device suddenly start to fire off 1000 messages to users they've never contacted before? Activity flagged, user blocked.
There are also functions in the iMessage app itself to block and report unwanted/inappropriate/spam messages. So even low-volume spammers will not get away with it for long.
Besides, in the UK, SMS spam is almost non-existent in my experience. Unlike in some other countries I've visited where it's a huge problem. That's not because the ecosystem is any different - it's because there's strict rules that are actively enforced (see TPS: www.tpsonline.org.uk).
This is just about sending.
They could implement something that works for other smartwatch vendors, they haven't because they don't want to.
PebbleOS is asking for the ability to respond to messages with reply or user interactions. This is not a security breach. And it won't leak from encryption anymore than it is leaking now.
Hardware should be able to be interoperable. Apple chooses not to, it's in their best interest because they claim "security" and "privacy" for it's users. Security theater for the masses.
Would like to add my personal experience: I get way more spam iMessages coming from random Apple IDs than I do spam SMSes.
My phone works, I'm glad it blocks others from integrating because I need it to always just work. That's why I still have an iPhone over all the often paper superior alternatives.
That's the root of the problem right there. As a hardware vendor, how do you achieve a "trusted" status in their ecosystem?
If only Apple devices can do the Appley things, then it really isn't an ecosystem (at least not what I have in mind when applying that term).
For the spam example, nothing prevents apple from offering a ble api with auth that ensures that only devices manually paired by the user access it.
As for automating spam... when we’re discussing ble, we’re talking about a device a few meters away from your phone. What are spammers going to do, send a jogger right behind you that spams you after somehow hacking apple’s auth system?!
Well, Apple will sure make sure the hard task is impossible. That's where the fault lies. It can be a bit tiring hearing security used as a smokescreen to maintain a monopolistic structure over uhh... green bubbles?
Perhaps SMS spam is a US thing?
I can understand if media poses concerns, but inbound and output text consisting entirely of UTF-8 characters?
Couldn't messages created externally to imessage be tagged as such and then just rate limited?
apple already does blue for in network and green for out of network
red can just be “this message was yolo’d, be aware”
This is the line of reasoning that has resulted in me being unable to sign up with a shocking amount of house rental companies, thanks to Play Integrity on the android side of the coin. Does it improve security for me? I would argue it doesn't, as it would force me to use unpatched versions of Android. If it's not serving the user, who is it for?
Really? I'm not in the Apple ecosystem to confirm but it looks trivial to me, and you can always fall back to keyboard/mouse input type of automation.
https://medium.com/@jameskabbes/sending-imessages-with-pytho...
Is this really true? I receive a lot of iMessage (not SMS) spam on iOS devices too. In fact for me I see more spam purely on iMessage than SMS. It wasn’t like that in the past, but my point is even closed systems can be abused.
Garmin Connect always runs in the background on my Android phone, watching for notifications, pulling data from and pushing data to Garmin servers on my behalf even when I'm not using the app. It's third-party, but it's reasonably well-written and doesn't nuke my phone battery or data plan - Android doesn't need to protect me or their reputation from Garmin. I can always check the weather or look at my daily workouts or whatever on my watch and trust that it's recently been upodated by the phone app phone. Garmin users with Apple phones complain that "Garmin doesn't work" after every iOS update that further hobbles the Garmin background service.
I get text notifications on my watch for any Android apps that provide notifications, and relevant ones (like text messages, whether SMS or RCS) provide an option to reply from the watch. I tap the top right button on the watch and scroll to "OK" or "Thanks" or "Can't talk right now" or whatever one of a half dozen canned responses covers 90% of my needs in this mode, and don't have to dig my phone out of my backpack or otherwise interact. Emails, calendar appointments, clock stuff, music controls, etc. all work over the watch. It's just as privileged as the phone, I'm not concerned about my Garmin intruding on my privacy as protected by Android, I wear the watch 24/7 and it has more data on me than the phone!
The trillion dollar companies are so massive that they are impinging upon every category of business that touches them. And they're so massive that their sinnew and tendrils touch everything under the sun.
Mobile computing is de-facto owned by two companies. It's owned, tightly controlled like an authoritarian government, and heavily taxed. Compared with the (formerly?) open web and desktop of the 90's - 10's, we've wound up in a computing universe where we're all serfs.
We're in a stagnant world where platforms don't evolve because that's where the moats lie.
Google, Apple, Amazon, and Meta desperately need to be broken up into multiple subsidiary companies. It'll oxygenate the entire tech sector and unlock pent up, unrealized value for the shareholders of these equities.
The reason we seldom see centicorn startups or blockbuster tech IPOs is because FAANG (or whatever we call it nowadays) has a dragnet where they can snuff out the markets of new upstarts or M&A on the cheap.
It costs nothing for Amazon to become Hollywood, buy James Bond and Lord of the Rings, become a primary care doctor, become a grocery store, and cross-sell all of these highly unrelated products on prime advertising real estate. It's essentially free for them to put ads at the top of the Amazon store and emblazen it on their delivery trucks and boxes. The old media, which were once healthy competitors, have to spend hundreds of millions to reach the same eyeballs.
We've wound up with Standard Oil 2.0 and it's deeply damaging our market. The innovators and innovation capital are no longer being rewarded. The calcified institutions are snuffing out everything that moves in search of remaining growth.
We must break up these companies. That is the only healthy way forward.
But we should also talk about the inverse thing where they give themselves an advantage in positive ways. Like for example, iOS devices will regularly advertise Apple’s own Siri intelligence or their own games subscription or news subscription or iCloud or whatever. These get special treatment and show up in unexpected ways - notifications that you cannot prevent ahead of time or in your system menu with an annoying badge you cannot dismiss until you click the thing. These are things Apple only does does THEIR OWN products and services. It gives them an anti competitive advantage against others, but it does so not by crippling others but by boosting themselves.
All of this should be illegal. I dislike regulations sometimes, for example when EU regulation gets into censorship. But they seem to be doing a lot more to help customers and support competition than the US. While Trump talked a lot about breaking up big tech, I am skeptical as to whether he’ll do anything to actually support competition and actual free markets. It will require regulation, not posturing.
This is 90% of humanity, including people we all know and love.
Apple serves these people pretty well.
To give one example, Apple has removed an option for Airdrop file sharing between iPhones that are not on one another’s contact lists after the pressure from the Chinese government to stop it from being used for protests coordination. And yet this change was silently rolled out globally as a part of an iOS update.
So, no, “Good enough for most people” is not actually good enough.
I tend to side somewhat with what the author is saying: they can be both relatively true statements and a way to abuse market power at the same time so identifying it as fitting the mold of one or the other is only the start of the conversation. People against the practices tend to care more about the latter and I think that's why we've seen the EU, Japan, and now Brazil regulate the behavior based on that rather than asking "what's Apple's target usage type".
You're making that statement as if iPhones don't have security issues and people using Android definitely have to learn about those things.
> They want to just click 'yes' on every popup and expect things to keep working. Because they know that they are not qualified to answer that yes/no popup question. And those people do not care much about lock-in and walled gardens.
What exactly is it that Apple does that makes it not matter whether you click 'yes' or 'no' on these popups?
This is an extremely dangerous mindset, even if you never leave Apple's garden. As a reminder, Facebook and TikTok are on the App Store. We cannot encourage this zombie-like behavior and simultaneously have a healthy, free society.
> Because they know that they are not qualified to answer that yes/no popup question
Apple put thought into their permission system and made it easy to understand even among non-HN users, so that regular people can make meaningful choices about what information they want to share with apps and the companies who make them. There might as well be no permission system and no sandboxing at all if users are just going to spam the "yes" button all the time.
If Apple wants to be the brand for the tech illiterate that's fine—the real problem is that their hardware (and to a lesser extent some of their software) is actually a lot better than the competition, especially every since the M1 CPU came out.
So people like me and other HN denizens are left to hope that either some competitor actually becomes competitive; or Apple positions itself in such a way that they can simultaneously provide the "dummy mode" for dummies, and the "power mode" for people like me.
For the latter option, they clearly don't want to do it, probably not because they don't trust power users to do power user things; but because leaning on the dummies for cover helps them protect their walled garden.
Cue great frustration.
When customers aren't empowered to choose which company they engage with, companies should not be allowed to choose which customers they support.
They are late with most new tech as they will just wait until it becomes cheaper, why? Because they already know it's not a deal breaker.
They removed a bunch of fundamental and heavily used ports from the Macbook for years. Because they knew people would just work around it and buy dongles.
They put the charging port for their wireless mouse on the bottom of the mouse so it wasn't possible to charge and use the mouse at the same time. Because they knew people would put up with it because it was pretty.
For a lot of people, it's not that it works well or anything. It's about the brand and the design. It's about the marketing. And when it's about that and not the actual product you can do whatever you want to your product and it doesn't really matter. And compatibility with other brands doesn't matter because they've already bought into Apple's brand over everything else including basic functionality.
This statement doesn't make sense except if you are implying that Android doesn't have reasonable security despite not being a walled garden like iOS, and allowing e.g. interactions with smartwatches.
There's extremely few reasons why a modern Android phone from Google or Samsung is less secure than an iPhone, against any attack vector that 99.sevennines% of people [1] would ever experience. The worst way I've ever seen the most tech-illiterate person ever mess up an Android phone is by installing some QR Code reader that took over as a home screen launcher so it could (nonmaliciously, but questionably) put its QR code reader as a home screen left of the app icons. It should be way harder for Play Store apps to do that, because this guy needed professional help (me) to figure out where his home screen layout went.
But that was it. That's the worst I've ever seen. Android's security is very good.
While not a security concern, I've had multiple iPhone users ask "what the heck is this screen to the right of my app icons" (referring to the App Library introduced ~2 years ago). One person thought they'd been hacked. Kind of a similar inconvenience vector as that QR code app.
[1] The 100-99.sevenines% of people who might actually find themselves the target of an attack vector that Apple's unique security can help mitigate are, for example, journalists or dissidents who find value in Advanced Data Protection and Apple's generally very good and healthy stance on cloud security and end-to-end encryption. This level of security should be available to everyone, on every cloud provider, even if it only directly advantages a small number of people, but Apple is the only one really doing this right now.
I'd say more like 95-99% of humanity tbh.
I finally understand what exactly I dislike in Apple. It's an authoritarian company.
Customers are interested in new products and services that are good. This is how all currently popular products began, obviously. By preventing competitors from being good, as Apple and Microsoft and Amazon and other mega corporations regularly do, there’s no chance for competition to get to the point of attracting customers in the first place. Those people that you think are not interested in one thing or the other COULD want those things if they were allowed and easy to do without all these anti competitive practices.
And "giving people choice" won't work neither because people will just tap whatever checkbox you give them (the internet should never forget that Facebook SDK just forces to accept "The App is Tracking You" notification and most users tapped yes).
An MDM administrator, managing a computer or device owned by an organization, cannot grant those permissions to anything without user consent. For good reason!
So why the *fuck* does Apple think they're entitled to?
This is what I like most about them! Just pick something that you think is good. If I like what you pick I'll keep buying from you.
...but the Apple ecosystem has the best tech. M chips, AirPods Pro, Apple Watch, iPad, Pencil, I mean the tech is great.
Apple isn't monopolizing anything. They're competing like hell and winning because their tech is best. The real question is why the Android and Microsoft ecosystems don't do better at improving their tech. Where's the Windows equivalent of an M4 MacBook Air in terms of performance and battery life?
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.
https://github.com/tombonez/noTunes
this will prevent itunes/apple music from opening
The conundrum of "[xyz] annoys me, but not enough to [do anything about it], yet I hope [Company] will be forced to improve [xyz]"
So where is that 'force' expected to come from...?
On the margin, it probably does annoy some people enough to do something about it. And even though Apple's policy on this isn't enough to move me, if you combine it with my other annoyances about Apple products, eventually the sum will be enough.
And we vocalize stuff like this because switching does have a cost that I'd rather not pay, so hopefully people who can make a change at Apple will see the discontent and fix it so that I don't have to pay the switching cost.
You can't expect that everyone who is bothered by an issue switch away from a platform. The switching cost is significant (and Apple works hard to make it as high as possible). Not to mention that the platforms (really one notable competitor) that they are considering switching to also have [def] and [ghi] that the user doesn't like which is also counterbalancing the decision.
When it comes to Apple, there probably is quite a bit of low hanging fruit:
- Allowing 3rd party interpreters, browsers engines, etc. on IOS. The OS has sandboxing, there should be no security argument here. Android can manage this, so why not Apple?
- Arbitrary app store restrictions and predatory fees on transactions. Apple is getting rich by essentially using mafia style schemes here. Nice App you have there. It would be a shame it got banned. Better implement X, drop feature Y, or else ... Oh and by the way, you need to pay us 30% on every transaction in your app and you are not allowed to link to payment options outside your app.
- Repairability issues. Apple products continue to score low here. And Apple makes quite a bit of money charging 3-4x component cost for parts and upgrades.
There are probably some more issues.
This is only getting attention now because these new Pebble devices are offering an Apple Watch alternative people actually want.
see this discussion, for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/AppleWatch/comments/1h6qmrw/spotify...
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...
I'm 100% certain that if 3rd party watches could integrate like apple watch could, that apple watch could be way better. But the lack of alternatives conceals how mediocre of a product it became. I wish apple wasn't such a control freak.
Readers might be interested in our Ultimate iOS to GrapheneOS Migration Guide and Review:
https://blog.okturtles.org/2024/06/the-ultimate-ios-to-graph...
Actually, let me make this worse. iOS has plenty of IPC, you're just not allowed to define your own IPC protocols. IPC is solely for your app to talk to Apple's code, not for apps to talk to each other.
https://www.engadget.com/2013-02-14-hack-brings-all-iphone-n...
https://github.com/conradev/btnotificationenabler
This has been a problem for a long time.
iMessage has been targeted for years with zero click exploits, most notably by the NSO group.
Apple’s restrictions aren’t meant to protect consumers, their purpose is to protect Apple’s profits.
While I still keep the Mac for professional purpose, I move over to fedora.
Or maybe reality is the opposite. That android phones that are supported by their vendor for maybe a year or two, have terrible battery life, allow any and all spyware, and generally suck aren't really comparable to the iPhone which effectively does the exact opposite? Or do you love being the product at Google?
The fact you cannot build a competing watch is unacceptable and the idea that "well go build one for Android" is refusing to acknowledge that Apple is its own market in and of itself.
Throw in the fact that even getting an app that isn't a game into the App store is not trivial, especially if it dares include some form of payment processing outside of the Apple-verse.
The Floatplane Saga, where Linus Tech Tips didn't want to use Apple payment processor because they would have to charge 30% more is another example. It took months and dozens of app resubmissions, only to have to use their massive YouTuber influence to get into contact with someone at Apple should be proof enough that the App Store has gone too far.
It's not like Apple started off letting third party watches work well and then suddenly locked them out (but you could argue from the article that they started off with minor handicaps and have increased the level of handicap over the years). Most people choose to buy iPhones knowing that only certain watch options work. It's not like anyone is suing Ford or Dodge for only making accessories that work on their own cars and trucks. It's not like anyone can legitimately complain that Ford is anticompetitive because they aren't making themselves compatible with Dodge oil filters.
If Apple did something anticompetitive to keep Android options from being good, then you probably have a winnable legal case. But it seems like Google, Samsung, and the other Android players are losing on their own merits.
Apple is its own market from the perspective of app developers. The app developers can only get to iPhone users through the Apple App Store, so restricting access and charging high fees is anti-trust.
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....
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.
From Apple's docs: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102842
"Message Access Profile (MAP 1.4)
This profile is compatible with iPhone 5s and later.
Message Access Profile allows devices to exchange messages. It's used to receive incoming message notifications on connected vehicles. iOS and iPadOS support these MAP functions on connected vehicles:
- Receive incoming message notifications
- Reply to incoming messages
- Compose new messages
- Browse message inbox
- Mark messages as read"
The documentation talks about "connected vehicles", but can totally be implemented by any Bluetooth accessory.
>•..
>•..
>•Not provide a user interface for sending messages. Devices do not support sending messages using MAP.
From: “Accessory Design Guidelines for Apple Devices” [0]
[0] https://www.bluetooth.com/wp-content/uploads/attachments/Blu...
They aren’t innovating inside the walled garden anymore.
Privacy is a real issue and Tim Cook deserves credit for his stance, but if apple gave devs good apis security and privacy could actually be enhanced throughout the ecosystem.
But after hearing repebble's complaints about not being able to do things that Garmin can do, I almost wonder if different vendors may be given different private api exceptions or something (just guessing, not an ios dev).
They arent the best, they are never 1st, they are 2nd or third or beyond.
Instead they found niches in marketing. Read the word "Security" or "Privacy" in white and black text in their commercials, no actual claims on either. Just the words. They have stylish products with their celebrities, dancing people, and blue bubbles. None add to the strength to the product. In the LLM world, they've tricked people into thinking 'unified RAM' and integrated video cards are equivalent to an Nvidia GPU.
Specifically on topic, iPhones seemed to always under perform in features. This is yet another example.
Their track record makes it obvious, but most consumers won't notice. That is why the deception works. I used to be an Android Zealot who preached the immorality of Apple, but I genuinely stopped caring that other people were making mistakes and Apple was exploiting them. If anything, I take notes personally how to be more like Apple, save my strength and get positive outcomes.
I ran rooted android phones for a long time, but have for the past few years been on GrapheneOS, which doesn't require Google Play, but allows you to use it while sandboxing it (so, harm reduction), and it's much less of a struggle now than it used to be.
The catch is that, at least currently, GrapheneOS only works on (Google) Pixel phones.
[On Kobos:— I agree on Kobo vs Kindle, and like Kobos a lot: but partially because I don't actually have to use Kobo's software if I don't want to. (See KOReader[0] and NickelMenu[1].)
I'm still recommending Apple to family members (less support needed from me, and I can always say I have Android and can't use apple so I can't help). But you have to go all in. If you want non apple stuff, just use something else. And if you can use Linux etc., why are you using Apple? Other then being lazy, which is totally ok.
It's not OK. This collective laziness and convenience is our number one enemy. People don't want to be responsible, they want some corporation to manage everything so they don't have to think about stuff.
We need more people to take responsibility and use Linux and free software and hardware. Owning the computing system means being responsible for it, and we need to get people to accept that responsibility. The less of us there are, the more business and financial sense it makes for them to just straight up ignore us as some irrelevant vocal minority.
We should all own our computers, and there should be so many of us that they have to suck it up because not doing so means they take a big hit to their profits.
You can just say that you don't have enough time or spoons to do free tech support.
They are so damn hostile to any third party integration, reserve apis for first party usage, and give middle finger to developers with their abusive fee structure (Apple takes a 30% cut …).
Only thing left is for my devices to age out (I am in deep with phone, watch, mbp, mba, and even Mac Studio M1 “ultra”)
The Apple razor: "Never attribute to security that which can be adequately be explained by incompetence."
Ble is a type of network communication that is only used for short distances, in order to save energy. We’re talking about a few meters, here.
The goal of the feature would be for people to pair their device with their iphone, something which users can do explicitly, ensuring that only their device works with their iphone.
Pairing an iphone with a third party device is already something that apple does, for instance in the case of personal hotspot.
Over BLE, it is possible to receive and delete notifications, as well as view and control media playback/volume/metadata.
Apple would never give Meta access to private APIs. Eric has access to everything that the Meta View app is doing.
What you can't do is reply to a text without using voice, which is what I'd like.
For instance, I understand Pebble is targeted to hackers, but how is lack of sideloading such a big pain point? How come my Fitbit (that I absolutely long to exchange for a new Pebble when its time comes) _can_ display my Whatsapp notifications even without full lockscreen previews?
Also:
> As an aside, back at Pebble, we went to crazy lengths to find a way to let Pebble users to send text messages from Pebble.
Why would you... Do that? No 3rd party can do that: you are on a level playing field. A kludge like the one described is not going to give you an edge over the competition. And it is exactly the kind of kludge that may rub App Store reviewers the wrong way. Much pain, no gain. Just invest your limited resources on making Pebble the best 3rd-party watch on the market, and pray/lobby for Apple to open up its APIs.
It's impossible to argue that this isn't intentional and to make the case that this isn't impacting competition, innovation and consumer choice here.
Hopefully someone takes Apple to task over this. If it can be done on Android without jeopardizing the security or optimizations of the phone - it can be done on iOS.
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/117767
Might be possible to do more (like call private apis) when apps don't need to pass app review.
You also still need to pay $100/year developer fee for your app to continue to be side-loadable (otherwise they revoke the notarization), and need to pay the €0.50 "core technology fee" per side-load to apple after a free allowance of side-loads.
I doubt it's going to help pebble since they'll have to pay more for users to side-load the app than to install it from the app store.
My wife loves her Garmin as it's just a better sports watch than an Apple Watch, no matter what Apple say, but the integration with the iPhone is poor.
It's about time Apple opened up integration with 3rd party watches. They could still vet it with human-reviewed capabilities, the same as they do with Tap to Pay with iPhone and Family Sharing APIs, but they choose not to.
Does that mean some vendors will be treated unfairly? Of course.
Does it mean Apple users will remain happy? Absolutely.
If there is one OS that is anti-tinkering by design it is iOS, and yet people keep criticizing this intentional design decision that forms a large part of Apple’s moat.
It's not reasonable to make a blanket absolutist statement like that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System
PS, why keep people defending this locked down consumer brand?
For example, could you build an app that would not pass app store review, that would be able to send SMS or manipulate notifications? If so you could just "install" it yourself with Xcode.
What type of company do you people think Apple is, one that pleases hackers at the expense of their competition?
As someone who uses Apple because of their MO is not selling everything about me to advertisers this is great news.
From the other recently-posted article, the new Pebble watches are targeting 30-day battery lives between charges. That would be unthinkable for a watch that manages its own wifi/cellular connections.
One, adding hardware to connect to WiFi and cellular increases size and power requirements. Notably, the new Pebble 's battery is projected to last 30 days.
Two, people use phones. They want their watch to work with their phone instead of around it.
Am I old or do people have higher expectations now?
Apple has lots of options at their disposal to frustrate any attempts to reverse engineer their APIs, and have shown they're willing to go above and beyond in defending their walled garden. If all else fails, every Apple device newer than 2018 has a secure enclave and verified boot, so they could just enforce an encrypted channel between the enclave - which will be able to attest that the device is running latest iOS or macOS with all DRM measures enabled - and iMessage servers. The only reason they don't do that already is the number of users on older devices, but that number gets lower and lower each year.
I got around Europe with a CA-53W. I did currency conversion, and had an alarm so I didn't have to leave my phone unattended in a 10 bed hostel.
I find my mind is clearer not using these things, not constantly bombarded with pings, and instead mindfully checking the phone occasionally to see if I missed any texts.
The easiest solution is to buy Apple Watch.
Lastly, ignore or dismiss any evidence that invalidates your preconceived conclusions, like the fact that these "floodgates" have always been open [1] and yet people credit non-existent floodgates for solving the spam problem.
Anecdotally, the amount of spam I receive across Signal and Telegram is zero, and SMS is very close to 0, maybe one SMS every few weeks.
[1] https://documenter.getpostman.com/view/765844/UV5RnfwM#0d8e0...
Their absolute lockdown nature simply makes them inferior devices, and sorry but, any excuse for non-free general purpose computers and (esp.)phones is seriously asinine.
- Swift UI layer for Apple-compliant UI/UX
- Zig core library (as XCFramework) for watch communication
- Data processing WebAssembly runtime for watchface interpretation
This avoids Pebble's original JS compiler workaround while still enabling customizable watchfaces within Apple's restrictions
The WASM engine stays within App Store guidelines by interpreting watchfaces as data rather than executable code
TL;DR to avoid this:
iOS App (Swift UI) <-> Zig Core Library (XCFramework) <-> WebAssembly Runtime (for watchfaces)
I long for a better alternative, but until then, yeah, here I am accepting my current PineTime is... a little bit worse, until Tim Sweeney manages to bust up Tim Cook's little garden.
I don’t want crap, I don’t want spyware, I don’t want spam.
If I did, id buy the insecure cheap plastic crap that the android ecosystem is.
uhhh and if there wasn't any reviewing, every update would come with a risk of malware to the users.
eh. nowadays it’s easier, at least in the EU
----
> he’s going to opine about how Apple is “anti-competitive,” and “evil,”
Complete with obligatory Trump mention.
I haven't owned a Pebble but have long heard how nice they are. That said, this is wrong:
>It’s impossible for a 3rd party smartwatch to send text messages, or perform actions on notifications (like dismissing, muting, replying) and many, many other things.
My Amazfit Balance lets me dismiss iOS notifications. I don't know how Amazfit's Zepp app enables this functionality; all I know is that it works.
Its integration with iOS is not ideal or complete; for example, although I can take and make phone calls with its mic and speaker, I can't talk to Siri through it despite my ancient $20 running headset being able to do so. But Balance's other advantages are more than enough for me to go with it over an Apple Watch.
> It’s impossible for a 3rd party smartwatch to [...] or perform actions on notifications (like dismissing, muting
REALLY? Why not RTFM?
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Co...
>Notification Actions
> Starting with iOS 8.0, the NP can inform the NC of potential
> actions that are associated with iOS notifications. On the
> user’s behalf, the NC can then request the NP to perform an
> action associated with a specific iOS notification.
These API have exited for over a decade and plenty of other wearables use them. Yes there are some limits, but many fewer than the original article implies to create outrage
Agree or disagree with what he's saying, he sounds like a petulant child
X restricts Y from being awesome.
Apple also restricts me from being awesome because they didn't give me a million dollar.
I get what the message is and I think I agree with Pebble on the iPhone being more closed off, but putting the blame on some outside thing for yourself not being awesome just feels immature.
It's just as easy to turn it around: by developing the iPhone in the first place and getting it in the hands of a lot of people, Apple makes it possible for Pebble to be at least close to awesome.
Up to that paragraph I sympathized. Sometimes it does feel like Apple doesn’t care one bit about me, an iOS developer. But, as a user, I really don’t care what phones the devs use. I use an iPhone and now I feel like I‘d be a second class citizen because of this paragraph. Not because Apple’s restrictions are unnecessarily bad, but because the devs just care less. I guess I‘d go for an Apple Watch instead.
(Was a first gen Pebble owner btw)
