Hacker News Reader

Comment by fy20 | Hacker News Reader

Is there a technical reason why this can't work with Apple's Find My network, or is it just that they don't want to work together? Using the "Unknown Trackers" feature my Samsung phone can scan for nearby AirTags and tell them to play sounds.

View on HN

Typical Apple hiding behind the walled garden to avoid actual competition via users not having any path to switching platforms.

The Apple value prop used to be “it all works together”, now it’s “half the shit you spent thousands on won’t work if you leave the island”.

The Tim Cook era is great for stock holders, but he’s one of the prime enshittifiers in Silicon Valley.

> The Tim Cook era is great for stock holders

Not anymore, since 2022 apple stock was mostly flat and today is even below January 2022. Vision Pro is a flop as today (maybe future iteration will change that) - just look at google trends.

Hopefully Apple change the course or Tim Cook get replaced - especially if they don't show anything meaningful related to AI/ML at this WWDC.

As much as I hate defending them, Apple does license out "Find My" tech, so is this really their fault?

Yes, but the entire MFi program is just a consumer tax paid to Apple. It’s an extortion racket.

Is it a "walled garden" or is it an "extortion racket" then?

The first is the mechanism for the second.

If we were to force all new technologies to be interoperable with all technologies from all possible competitors we’d create a Kafkaesque nightmare for innovators and particularly early stage startups.

Shouldn't they just all publish the RFCs and actually implement the techs the way they are written in the RFCs?

Like, you know, the Internet?

Indeed. Good example. If Cerf, Kahn and others had been forced to make the internet (as we know it today) compatible with with nascent competitors such as X.25, Cyclades, OGAS and EIN, it would have compromised the design process with a “too many chefs” problem.

Also would have forced the Internet to a lowest common denominator of capability.

In the IOT/Home Automation device world, Zigbee and Z-Wave were competing standards.

Z-Wave was a proprietary standard and have a device certification process.

Zigbee was a open-source IEEE standard.

Both had their pros and cons but weren't interoperable.

Manufactures have agreed to create and move to a new standard "Matter"

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_(standard)

I don't see why this success storey couldn't happen for the 'lost device world' or most other proprietary non-interoperable systems. (why can't i send a message from Whatsapp to Messenger)

It’s actually two separate aspects, there’s the network for crowdsourced finding, and there’s the localisation of unwanted trackers.

The feature that lets you ring nearby trackers is actually standardised between Apple, Google, Samsung and the others. It goes by DULT - Detection of Unwanted Location Trackers.

The crowdsource networks are not compatible.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com