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Comment by profsummergig | Hacker News Reader

Was talking to an older lady the other day.

Very non-tech. Only uses an iPhone and an Apple watch. No laptop or tablet/iPad.

Gets a surprisingly large quantity of things done via her phone.

My phone is an Android. She shared 2 things her iPhone can do that I don't think my phone (OnePlus 7 pro) and watch (Amazfit T-Rex 2) combination can do:

- she can always find out where she parked her car

- her watch buzzes to warn her if she leaves her keys or phone behind in her car. I think she has some airtag type of thing in her keyring.

Surprised that Android phone + watch combination doesn't already natively offer these features (with easy discoverability).

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I feel AW is underrated as an everyday tool, especially when it comes to being mindful about contemporary attention sinks.

You can do almost anything from it that doesn't require a larger screen or a keyboard, and the kinds of activities the larger screen enables tend to mostly just waste your time. Take a typical 2007 "dumb" phone - the watch screen is roughly that size.

It becomes awkward when you need to find something on the web (you can't even access the browser directly, you need to ask Siri and work with a popup), but I was mildly successful following a recipe when cooking. It's plain better than a phone at many other common tasks (following directions, checking the weather, paying for stuff, telling time, etc).

The biggest impact it had is that I no longer feel compelled to reach for my phone in most situations. It's not just that it saves 5-10 seconds here and there: the context switch is brief enough that I can remain focused on whatever I was doing.

(inb4 just turn off notifications, yes I am already very picky about what is allowed to distract me.)

I agree, for me the biggest value of the Apple Watch is how much it has liberated me from my phone. I use my iPad for content browsing, and my watch for responding to incoming notifications, and my phone mainly serves as a camera.

The (literal and figurative) friction of dragging my phone out of my pocket when I receive a call or text or other alert is gone, and I love it.

Having just bought my first Apple Watch about four months ago - I've been really surprised at how useful and unobtrusive it is. Hate to admit it, but I should have bought one years ago. Having said that, I'm still not sold on the Apple Vision Pro.

> Having said that, I'm still not sold on the Apple Vision Pro.

Yeah. To me VP feels like carrying a boombox on your shoulder, when all you actually need are AirPods.

Google (Maps?) has done the car parking location for 10+ years. But like many things Google, Google software is not well integrated with itself, and discoverability is bad. It's perfectly possible that this feature has been removed and re-added several times during the last decade, as is the fate of many Google projects.

It still works but only in certain circumstances. You need to navigate to a destination that is far enough away and visited less frequently as to be categorized as a visit. Maps will not save your parking location in front of your office, for example.

If I leave an airtag in my car, I will always know where it is because my phone is constantly looking for the BT signal.

Just to add, in the Find My app, you can whitelist (or blacklist depending on how you look at it I suppose) addresses that it won’t notify you about.

So I don’t get a notification when I leave my iPad at home, but I do whenever I leave it at work, for example.

And that's what I mean. The idea is there, and they have all your location data, but the feature is not polished, it's inconsistent, and not reliable, so it might as well not exist.

Yup, Google Maps automatically marks the location of your parked car... Until once in a blue moon it doesn't. This happened to me just yesterday. Thankfully, Apple Maps marked it automatically, too

I use a seperate app for car navigation. Can't trust Google.

But a lot of people apparently want a single "super" app that does everything. Musk was right about that- we're all going to see a Western WeChat emerge. All hail integration.

Google and Microsoft have the resources and market penetration to create a Western WeChat, but these companies are too fragmented internally, so their various teams will never be able to work together to pull it off.

Apple will probably be the one creating something like a "super ecosystem", but reserved for Apple users of course.

I can't imagine any other company pulling it off. Amazon could but its reputation seems so bad lately that I doubt people would jump in. So I find it incredibly hard to believe that a true "Western WeChat" could emerge any time soon.

My car is apparently parked on the same spot from 3 years according to Google maps, however it's very far from my house and I never go there, no idea how to unpin that location and set new ones.

Honestly, if I could buy and provision my Apple Watch with cellular without having to have an iPhone, my only devices would be my MacBook and my Apple Watch.

I seldom carry a phone around with me, and my Apple Watch does every thing I need while outside the house.

I've been waiting for years for that (or at the very least being able to manage the watch from an iPad, as I tend to carry that around with me).

The only other thing the watch is missing is the ability to connect to bluetooth in my car, so if I have left my phone behind I can still answer calls or listen to music. I'm sure this is intentionally crippled as it starts the pairing process then fails - tried in several cars with different makes of head unit.

I've been (kind of) successful with this with my Apple Watch SE and Honda Civic. The issues arise when I have both my phone and watch in the car and it wants to connect to the watch. Then things get confused and don't work out the way you would want. With just the watch, however, it seems to work fine.

On a related note, I've had significant issues trying to play music through airpods through the watch. I can get it to connect, and it plays a few seconds of music, then goes silent. The screen still indicates its playing. Very frustrating.

I think Android can do parked car trick. I am guessing only but google maps apps on iOS shows where I have parked car. I am surprised that google does not offer something similar to airtag.

You can use any iBeacon/EddyStone BLE device for this, they are very cheap and are widely available. However, there are no neat built-in features in apps shipped with phones that make use of them on Android apps, you always have to use some 3rd party app and the UX there is usually not that great.

That’s not how this feature works and not how this is notified to the user

The third party app remembers the location when it last received pulse from the beacon that is in the car and when you open it, leads the user back to it.

Disclosure: I actually happen to kno exactly how this feature works, as I added support for iBeacons in apps for iOS and Android in one of our projects. Not for the functionality described above, but for waking the app once a user walks to a proximity of a beacon. My office beacon is laying at a distance of less than 1meter from me right now.

Afaik, iOS does save a location, and marks it as a parked car, when it looses the bluetooth connection to a device it identified as being a car. So no additional hardware needed for this to work.

It is a different thing, and we're talking mostly about androids.

So lets talk about android - does it something like that automatic? Remember location when bluetooth is disconected sound nice.

No, it doesn't. Did I ever say it did? Also, in my part of the world I don't see many cars around that connect to Android/iOS as a Bluetooth accessory anyway.

Pretty sure you could do both with Tasker, but it's one of those tools that is almost too powerful (therefore too generalized) to be casually approachable for simple things like this. There may be pre-existing templates that gets you fairly close.

For the parked car trick I would guess you'd do something like set up a trigger that fires when your phone or watch disconnect from your car's Bluetooth and drops a notification with your GPS location that you would tap on your way back to the car to have it pull up in Google Maps.

I have a similar task set up that automatically switches on my wireguard tunnel as soon as home Wi-Fi signal is below a certain strength for more than 10 seconds (the implication being that I am departing not only the house but also the immediate area outside where my Wi-Fi still operates). As a fairly unsophisticated Tasker user I was able to cobble this together in about 2 hours by starting from a template that did something similar, including the testing necessary to confirm where the cutoff dB should be.

On Garmin watches, Settings > Notifications & Alerts > System Alerts > Phone > Connection Alerts On. Yeah, it's a little buried :-)

garmin watch will buzz you if it looses connection to phone. have an app from car on android phone showing where car is located

the nice thing about the parked car trick is it is available right on the watch face. one click

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