Look at something like Active Directory that is in theory ldap.
Do you really want to mix AD and open LDAP? You can, and it's a massive pain in the ass. Now you have apple iWatch apps talking to android. Where does apple maintain the translation layer? Does google/samsung take a "fuck off" stance and lock them out? What does the user experience look like when the "bug" in the app is on android and your CALLING apple for support...
I think that last bit is the limit that folks dont really think about. You can call apple, show up at store and they are going to try to fix your issue... when your random android device breaks who do you call?
"the technical limitations" are "we cant control android" and "does not fit our customer support philosophy"
Sure apple could have likely brought the baseline functionality of Apple watch to Android, however apps would have likely been much much more complicated, and are a key part of apple watch.
As for issues with the Garmin ecosystem, that's totally irrelevant. The basic fact is that nothing is stopping third-party smartwatch vendors from building good integration with Android phones. Garmin is just one example. Others such as Suunto and Coros have done the same thing. There are no significant technical obstacles.
If anyone involved in it could explain to me why they chose to force an OO language on people on a platform where some targets have so little memory that you’ll find yourself cutting lines of code to save memory used by the code itself, not even when it’s executing, thus throwing away a bunch of bytes supporting objects when there’s not enough space to even really take advantage of inheritance—I’d love to know the story. It’s such a weird choice.
So, Garmin may be bad but at least they are a lot cheaper and work with more things. At any given price point, they are a lot better as sports watches too.
Anyway, I stopped caring because there is no real compelling use case for a smartwatch, my next one will be a sport watch from Garmin or another competitor. Problem solved.
Edit: Sounds like it was about privacy concerns, so probably something like there not being a completely foolproof way of preventing a third party from grabbing health data from the android app.
The claim would hold up even if it were a lie. "We concluded that Androids API wasn't compatible with the Apple Watch". Not a lie, but obviously still a complete lie.
> and I’m sure they’d love to increase Watch revenue by addressing the other half of the duopoly.
What they would love way _more_ is lock-in. You want this new shiny? It's only in the Apple ecosystem.
What Apple could do instead to get around this would be to make the watch be 100% standalone. I don’t think that’s as easy as it sounds though.
it's hard to believe anyone buys an iphone to get access to the watch, but if your watch is easier to use than your phone the incentive could run the other way
I've personally considered making my next phone an iphone just to get a watch (though I've so far avoided doing so out of distaste for the iphone). I've seen other people on the internet claim that they have.
One particularly anticompetitive and anticonsumer action that Apple has taken is locking down the iPhone API for replying to text messages. Android devices allow third-party smartwatches to both display and respond to text messages. Consumers can pair a third-party smartwatch with an iPhone and read text messages but they aren't allowed to reply. There is no legitimate reason for this artificial limitation beyond product tying.
I don't see how they could have done it without significant co-operation from the Android OS team far deeper than even two allied companies are typically able to communicate. The other alternative would have been to design a totally different piece of hardware that operates according to the Android OS expectations but that's hardly "bringing Apple Watch to Android".
Again, there exists a totally different hardware product Apple could build for Android that runs on Android OS expectations but it wouldn't be an Apple Watch.